Quote from: WillLem on April 12, 2026, 03:13:03 PM10-of-everything levels are not just for beginners. They make good warm-up levels to get the cognitive synapses firing ready for more challenging fare.

Completely agree with this. I consider myself a fairly experienced player at this point, but I still enjoy X-of-everything levels. They can certainly be made more interesting with talismans (the recent Lemmings Faithful pack is a good example of this), but you can also set yourself challenges like always saving 100% wherever possible. It's just nice sometimes imo to not have an extremely limited skillset and a single intended solution that you have to find, as you can get creative with your solution and explore the open-endedness that affords.

The poll is still open (for another six days, in fact), but in a community this size, 8 votes means we can already draw some conclusions based on current standings. It's pretty evenly split between yes and no, but slightly favouring yes. A strong majority are not bothered by "ghost repeats". Also, I want to take into account that a recurring theme in previous feedback (e.g. Pieuw's spreadsheet and Flopsy's video) has been that previous versions of the pack get tough too quickly.

It's true that the pack is unlikely to be played by anyone as literally their first experience of Lemmings (which is why I didn't bother asking for opinions on skill tutorial levels; we are simply not bringing those back); but it should be approachable for players at all skill levels.

So, my inclination is to keep 10-of-all repeats but reduce their number, and in particular, I think we should add some new ones to help out the very beginning of the pack, while dropping some of the less interesting existing ones. I'll come up with more concrete suggestions for this around the time the poll closes.

geoo, given your stance, we can cut "Canopy Lemmings" (the 10-of-each repeat of "Stroke at Retirement Age") if you prefer, though I would like to keep that one as it's certainly one of the more interesting 10-of-each levels.

10-of-everything levels are not just for beginners. They make good warm-up levels to get the cognitive synapses firing ready for more challenging fare.

Above all, though, the most important thing a pack should have: variety.

So:

Quote from: geoo on April 12, 2026, 09:25:09 AMSure, levels with lenient skill sets are beginner friendly as they allow players to explore mechanics. But similarly, levels can have a small set of skills (in particular few different skills) and only use straight-forward mechanics and thus be beginner friendly and yet not easy ... At least these could be interleaved between the 10-of-each levels.

Yes, agreed - mix it up, give people a bit of everything.

I'm not a big fan of padding packs with a bunch of 10-of-each levels at the beginning (regardless of whether they are repeats or not), especially if it's a long chain of them. I find them rarely interesting, and usually they are just work and become repetitive really fast. I guess talismans can sometimes spice them up, but I still think the fewer of these the better.

I think there's a difference between easy and beginner friendly. Sure, levels with lenient skill sets are beginner friendly as they allow players to explore mechanics. But similarly, levels can have a small set of skills (in particular few different skills) and only use straight-forward mechanics and thus be beginner friendly and yet not easy. For example, I wouldn't find it outrageous if "Eeny, meeny, miny... OH", "Little miner puzzle" or maybe even "The Placement is the Key" appeared in the second level slot. They are still accessible to beginners but arguably more interesting for the seasoned players. At least these could be interleaved between the 10-of-each levels.

Maybe this is moot anyway as I suspect pretty much anyone playing custom packs has enough familiarity with the game to be beyond "beginner" level anyway.

Solutions to all levels. A couple of these may be backroutes.

I voted for no repeats at all. Not every pack needs beginner fare.

But Proxima knows that I don't like repeats in general, and I'm not necessarily the target audience here. Count vote as you wish.

I like how you're not re-packaging levels that already are in standalone author packs.

-- Simon

Quote from: JawaJuice on April 11, 2026, 07:48:13 PMI also played through v4 in its entirety (last year) and whilst it's not fresh enough in my mind to comment on individual levels, I'll attach my replays - not sure how useful this is, but if you wanted to check specific levels for backroutes, there's a good chance I found some I suppose the relevant level creator would have to verify that though.

FWIW, I voted to exclude levels duplicated in other packs from the new version of RotL. Personally, if I've played the level in another pack (which would always be the case for MazuLems, Clammings and Insane Steve's World), I'd rather not play them again in RotL - I feel it just makes for unnecessary bloat to an already sizable pack when these other NL packs are all readily available. Just my two cents.

Honestly this is a good point and I can see people actually skipping over levels they've already played in another pack. It feels redundant. I know I'm totally going back on what I just posted the other day but well that's why you can see I shouldn't be in charge of things like this anymore   

Same thoughts as in regards to X-of-each skill levels. Honestly that was the hardest thing with this pack (I've probably said this too many times already) but I know there were a lot of complaints about the difficulty curve but the fact was there just wasn't a huge selection of levels to make it a really smooth curve. But I mean, we know already have the NeoLemmix introduction pack and the a good selection of already easy levels/packs in the community in general now so I don't think it's bad if this pack doesn't have tons of easy levels.

New poll is up. At this point we need to decide what to do about 10-of-each-skill repeat levels.

We have a decent number of easy levels for early on, but, as the gap between 1-1 "9 ways to live" and 1-2 "Through Fire and Flames" suggests, if we don't allow 10-of-each repeats then even the early rank will get tough (from a beginner perspective) pretty quickly.

I also want to know whether people are okay with what mobius termed "ghost repeats" -- creating a 10-of-each skill repeat of a level without using the original level in the pack. On the one hand, that feels a little disrespectful to the original creator; but when we release the pack, we would include a list of such levels, so we wouldn't be misleading players into thinking they were originally designed as 10-of-each. We'd be honest about this being a version specially designed for RotL.

An example of a level we might want to do this with is "Lemmings on the Run", the first level of Ben Bryant's set. It's an easy level, suitable for an early slot, and the original and 10-of-each versions are close enough that we wouldn't want to include both. But I wouldn't include this and other similar levels unless I felt confident that the community was okay with it.

As I am removing the poll and starting a new one, for the sake of transparency, here is a permanent record of the poll result:

What should we do with levels duplicated in other packs (e.g. MazuLems, Clammings, Insane Steve's World)?

Keep them in the level pool and just discard the less good ones - 2
Remove them all (maybe keep just one or two) - 3

Quote from: kaywhyn on April 10, 2026, 09:40:56 PMLevel selection is a very lengthy process, much more than you think, so I'm in agreement here with Proxima that rushing to get a first draft of level selection for Pack 1 isn't the way to go Especially for a project of a large size like this one. Hence I prefer that Proxima and anyone else who wants to help with level selection take time and not rush through it.

Maybe people are misunderstanding what I mean by "First Draft".

My suggestion is simply that we set up a framework on which to build. Levels can be swapped out, moved around, and we get a clear sense of cohesion and direction right from the very start. I'm not suggesting that the first draft be viewed as something that could potentially be released, which is what people seem to think. On the contrary, the first draft should really be nothing more than a list of placeholders. I mean, it could literally say "to be decided" for every entry at this stage!

With that said, the spreadsheet is providing real-time progress updates, which is great. And, Proxima's mentioned that he intends to draft the first rank fairly soon anyway. At that point, things will start to take shape and we'll have a clearer idea of what we're dealing with.

Quote from: kaywhyn on April 10, 2026, 09:40:56 PMAt least personally, I rather do things right the first time around

Impossible. That's why versioning is a thing.