Gravity

[Clam]

This has been a hot topic of debate on the IRC lately, so I thought I'd put it to the forum for more opinions.

Various IRS games have played with the ability to change the direction of gravity. Lemmings Revolution has antigravity traps that turn lemmings upside down, Clones has traps that flip creatures upsidedown or sideways, and Turtle Trench lets you flip gravity on individual creatures via a skill. I've compiled some arguments for and against gravity changing in an IRS, please feel free to add to these. This list is in the context of adding gravity changing to Lix, since that's the topic under debate right now.

Pros:
+ More variety in puzzles. Think about it - upward diggers, downward builders, downward climbers, crazy flinging (tumblers go in different directions depending on their gravity)... Sideways gravity opens up even more fun possibilities.
+ Novelty. Gravity changing in IRS is rare enough that it's still new and fun, especially with some of the unique effects it would have in Lix. This won't hold in the long run though.

Cons:
- Implementation. Every existing skill and object has to be adapted to work with different gravities, and if you want to add anything new to the game, that has to work in multiple gravities as well. That means an overhaul of the existing code, much playtesting, and a commitment to more work in future. This delays release as well, and we don't want to keep the game unreleased forever.
- Complexity. The game can only take so many features before it becomes overwhelming, for new players especially. Just look at Clones . Gravity changing is an inherently complicated feature, much more so than adding another skill or a 'niche' feature like trampolines. This is especially relevant in multiplayer - new players find it hard enough, with world wrapping and all that, only the real hard core (i.e. Simon and geoo) are likely to enjoy gravity-intensive multiplayer maps.
- It's ultimately unnecessary. The purpose of Lix, at least to begin with, was to make an IRS with multiplayer capability, and better mechanics than the original Lemmings games. I'd say (with congratulations to Simon, geoo and all other contributors ) that the game has pretty much achieved this already.

My own view of the feature at the moment (subject to change wildly, of course ), is that it's somewhat of a guilty pleasure. I really want to try it in Lix, I want to build and play some great puzzles that use it, but at the same time I don't want it to take over the game. I'm worried that if it's added, there will be a proliferation of levels that depend on the mechanic, and much of the game will be played upside-down. At that point it's just not the same game any more.

So there are some considerations with regard to potentially adding the feature to an IRS. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who's played with gravity in Clones or Lemmings Revolution, or indeed Turtle Trench, for a perspective on how good a feature this is in existing IRS's. My own recent experience with Turtle Trench is that limited application of flipping is good fun, and makes for a neat addition to some puzzles, though it's not used extensively enough in that game to get a really good look at it. It's worth noting that flipping is implemented as a skill here, which largely procludes en-masse flipping of creatures, whereas in other games it's done with a trap that flips all creatures that touch it - again, opinions of Clones/Revolution players on the merits of that system are welcome.

Thanks for reading, and tell me what you think about gravity changing and whether we need it!

---

˙sǝob ʇı ʍoɥ ǝɯ ןןǝʇ puɐ uʍop-ǝpısdn x!Ⴈ buıʎɐןd ʎɹʇ :ɹp'ןʇ

[mobius]

Interestingly, in Revolution, the anti-grav pads were one of the few features that were not under-exploited. But I'm sure there's still tons of puzzle options to explore with them. I just thought of an interesting one; up one way walls, which can only be dug through upside down.
-It could be seen as unnecessary. many of the Revolution levels kind of use it as a novelty.

However, I agree that if you guys are going to add new feature to Lix there are probably other features easier to code that could come first; like break-away floors, switches and doors, or teleporters even. At least with those, as you said, you wouldn't have to create upside down actions for everything else.

If you really added stuff I'd especially like either timed doors or switches. This really gives an addition to puzzle opportunities in the game. Instead of the only major goal being the exit, there are now other direct points in the level you must reach; a switch. Either in a circular route or in sacrifice.

I'd say sometime, I'd definitely like to see gravity come back, in some way or another. But it's not a dire need for me. (Of course I'd like a new official lemmings game to be released.  )

[Clam]

Okay, easy there, this isn't the great Lix wishlist thread . Every new feature adds to the 'feature creep', and pushes the game further into Clonesville. The question is, is it worth it, for each individual feature?

One-way walls have been discussed at length too, and it's not clear exactly how they should function even under normal gravity, eg. for a right OWW, should diggers be allowed facing either way (as in L1), or only facing right, or not at all since they go downwards? It was only after a long while, and much discussion, that it was decided that OWW's should even be in the game, and even now they aren't actually done - that's the kind of scrutiny new features get around here

Also, I found a Youtube vid of that Revolution level, and the player backrouted it avoiding the gravity pads altogether. So not really necessary then

[Simon]

Excellent thread *munches snacks*

My experience from Clones multiplayer is that different gravities devalue 1v1 levels. Sabotage is the main task in 1v1 when players get stronger, and players simply cannot sabotage each other efficiently if all/many lems have a different gravitiy than the other player. If you play 1v1 on Octogame, an 8-player map with 4 possible gravities, it gets most interesting if the players pick the two spawn positions of the same gravity. I made the small 1v1 map Hausdorff which gives both players one single lem with upside-down gravity, so see if it can be used efficiently in some way, but this lem is usually ignored.

Different gravities get better in free-for-alls, but I don't like that as much as 1v1, so I can't tell for good. Lix can already be very chaotic and confusing even with 3 players on certain maps; its key ingredients are toroidal wrapping, multiple hatches, and several viable routes. >_>

Camera behavior/turning, directional select, etc, all these become issues when introducing multiple gravities. In Clones, directional select gets rotated according to the gravity (hold left to assign to upside-down lem walking right), which makes sense since there are 4 gravities altogether in need of a common rule, but I still make mistakes.

-- Simon

[Proxima]

Well, I have experience with Cheapo, which has gravity reversal traps and inverted trapdoors.

I'm not in favour. Some interesting puzzle levels were made with it, but I don't remember ever seeing one that stood out and screamed "this is a really cool concept that could never have been done without gravity reversal and justifies its inclusion in the game". What you can do with the standard eight skills and standard gameplay is already complex enough that its possibilities are nowhere near exhausted; this goes double for Lix, which already has additional skills and objects -- some of which, such as flinging, are far too complex for my liking, and I often find myself giving some of the new levels a brief look before deciding this one's not for me and moving on. I definitely don't want to add to the list of features that have that effect on me, which reverse gravity in the hands of the forum's team of fiendish puzzlers almost certainly would.

Since this has been brought up, diggers should be able to dig a one-way wall facing either direction, both because keeping the same behaviour makes it easier to remake existing levels, and because digging is often necessary to get a lemming in the correct position to bash or mine in the correct direction, especially if you don't have floaters.

[geoo]

About normal and upside-down gravity, I don't remember much from the time I had a go at Lemmings Revolution, I just remember the effect from Cheapo, where I've seen it in a very few levels. From what I remember, these levels didn't make very innovative use of it.

Now Clones has 90 degree gravity (i.e. in 4 directions), and some very elegant puzzles have been made with it that just wouldn't work without. For instance, you got the duality between a builder bridge which is a steep bridge in the other direction, digger tunnels that become something like basher tunnels when rotated by 90 degree and vice versa, normal/steep miner tunnels, platformers are like stackers when viewed from another direction. If kept clean and simple, you can still wrap your head around this, and it makes for tough but fun puzzles, like some in Clones employing this feature. Of course, combine that with flinging and other stuff and things get really complex and confusing, so it all depends on what you do with it. While certainly cool for some things, Lix already offers many other feature, so it certainly isn't a must-have.

For multiplayer, which Simon already mentioned, I've experienced that if you got Lemmings from multiple gravity directions in your team, you're best off ignoring all but one direction lest you confuse yourself. The above mentioned effects that could be interesting for puzzles don't play much of a role anymore. And even if you stick to one gravity direction and another player has his own, it just feels strange as many skills don't have significant effect on the other player (e.g. blockers are basically useless), and it's hard to have control over the other players' route, so basically all that works seems to be constant sabotage if you have access, i.e. type 1 levels.

In any case, I wouldn't want to implement it in Lix (I mean it might be ok if one designs a game from scratch with it in mind, but Lix wasn't done like this), as I think it's basically putting checks in hundreds of places. Simon doesn't seem too hot about the feature anyway, so I wouldn't expect it to happen anytime soon (unless someone else feel the urge strong enough to do it himself).

[ccexplore]

I've played Clones and I did enjoy a good number of levels in there that uses gravity.  Note that Clones has sideways gravity as well (ie. 90-degree rotations in addition to 180 degrees), so it definitely opens up even more possibilities to the existing skills.  Also, even when it is mostly just for fun, gravity does also allow for somewhat more compact level design by allowing greater utilization of walls and ceilings.

It is also of note that in Clones, you can freely rotate your view of the screen in any increment of 90 degrees.  I do have to say that without that ability, execution can potentially get a little confusing and annoying from time to time (and especially at first).  I myself would definitely refuse (or at least feel very de-motivated) to play levels that spend the majority of time upside-down for no real reason, if the view can't be rotated.

In both Clones and Revolution, even though the gravity feature is there, it is not like you see it every other level.  Most levels still forgo use of gravity.  I kinda suspect that it can be tricky to make use of gravity effectively in level design.  This can be a good and bad thing:  good because you probably won't get an overrun of levels using gravity as Clam fears, bad because it might also mean most of the levels that do use gravity only utilize the feature in superficial ways.

There's little question that if one were to consider adding more features to Lix gameplay, there are far more low-hanging fruits than gravity.  Things like pick-up skills, exits with a max limit of how many Lixes can go in, pre-placed Lixes, uncontrollable lemmings (in Clones they come up as differently colored, they can still exit and be counted, but not assigned skills to), and much more.  And I definitely believe there are enough features in Lix already to, for example, support creation of a full set of 100+ community levelset with sufficient variety and fun.

[Clam]

Good points about multiplayer there, that pretty much confirms my suspicion that gravity swapping is just a bridge too far as far as complexity in MP games. If it confuses even the best players, then things aren't looking so good for newbies . Just as for SP, it's entirely possible to create great MP maps without the need for this feature, and there's plenty of room to create more.

Also, I wasn't aware that Cheapo had this feature already, shame it wasn't explored much though. I guess it's rather easy to make bad levels with gravity, and tough to make really good ones, more so than with most other features.

As for the view rotating, I would've thought it'd be easier to keep the view the same all the time - from what little I've seen of Clones the screen rotation is quite disorienting. Again, my experience with this is very limited, maybe this is actually easier to get used to than assigning to rotated creatures in the default view? I'm also wondering whether Clones' method of directional select is the best one. An alternative might be to use the direction the lemming is facing in the current view - left/right for normal/upside-down lems (mirrored not rotated for upside-down lems), and up/down for lems rotated to 90 or 270 degrees.

[ccexplore]

As for the view rotating, I would've thought it'd be easier to keep the view the same all the time - from what little I've seen of Clones the screen rotation is quite disorienting.

To clarify, there is no screen rotation when viewing replays in Clones (note that replays viewing in Clones is like viewing movies, you can't jump in in the middle and take over like you can in Lix, you use savestates instead for that purpose).  In fact in one game update, they accidentally made it so that replays have the screen rotation locked to the currently selected Clone.  That was immediately obvious and horrifically disorienting when I started viewing replays in that version of the game.  It was fixed relatively quickly though, fortunately.

It has been such a while since I last played a SP level in Clones, so I can't say for sure how often I rotate the view when playing, but I remember find it useful at least from time to time.  It makes sense because during SP level solving, you tend to focus on a single specific area of the level at most given times, and so it can be helpful sometimes to adjust the rotation to "normalize" the view when you are going to spend significant amount of time working with a Clone in alternate gravity.

Again, emphasis on the screen rotation being under my control.  Clones have an option to lock the rotation to the currently selected Clone, but even for playing (as opposed to view replays), it is still quite problematic compared to being able to rotate the screen only when I feel like it.

So I guess you can say that screen rotation is a nice to have for gravity, but not an absolute necessity (disregarding the imbalance in MP).  I suspect if gravity is confined to just 180-degrees (upside-down only like in Revolution and I think Cheapo), then screen rotation is probably even less needed.

[mobius]

There's little question that if one were to consider adding more features to Lix gameplay, there are far more low-hanging fruits than gravity.  Things like pick-up skills, exits with a max limit of how many Lixes can go in, pre-placed Lixes, uncontrollable lemmings (in Clones they come up as differently colored, they can still exit and be counted, but not assigned skills to), and much more.

I really like these ideas.
What do you mean by pick-up skills?
-skills that a lemming/lix can only learn when it walks across something in the level?

maybe if/when we get a group of 100~whatever levels in this community set; you can call this one a "game"   Then work on a second levelest with more features and call that game 2.  That would organize it a little better if you ever add more features. (and why stop with one levelset?  )

[ccexplore]

What do you mean by pick-up skills?

Think of it as an item placed into the level that a lemming can pick up by walking into said item, and will increase your skill count of a particular skill by some amount.  So for example, a puzzle may force you to get to some particular place in the level, so that you can pick-up an item giving you X more builders, in order to have enough builders to complete a path in some other parts of the level.

[GuyPerfect]

IRC, you say? Gimme server! Gimme channel! (Meow Mix Meow Mix please delannel?)

[mobius]

http://webchat.quakenet.org/?channels=lix

this works for me; enter a name and join in. (I'm the new guy however, so I don't pretend to know anything)