Your level design posts are always excellent food for thought, and start some discussions that are well worth having, even if I usually end up disagreeing with most of what you say
Haha, thanks!
Yeah, I was certainly expecting you to disagree with regards to X-of-everything levels (see below).
Generic level titles are something I'm guilty of myself, especially with regard to Pit Lems, because mechanics were pretty much the only thing driving this one. That's why I wanted to have an overarching theme for my next pack, and that's how the idea to Lemmings World Tour was born
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10-of-everything levels: We had a topic on this, and you completely ignored my posts. I agree, the Tame levels don't teach the player the skills they need for solving more complex or restricted puzzles. But the Fun levels do. I gave a breakdown in this post. Most Tame levels have one to three obstacles, each of which is overcome separately by a single skill; in other words, Tame 2-20 teach you nothing more about putting a solution together beyond what you already learned in Tame 1. The Fun levels present much more varied obstacles, requiring much more varied solutions, and you end up learning a lot about how to overcome different types of situation.
I grant that one specific thing the Fun levels don't teach is conserving resources or dealing with the lack of specific skills. But because the Fun levels lay a good groundwork in how to get through the situations the game presents, when you reach the first levels that cut down the available resources, it's a relatively small leap -- whereas, as you said, the leap from Tame to Dolly Dimple is huge.
Far from it, I was very aware of your post when writing this
. It should be noted that my criticism was pointed mainly towards the X-of-everything levels I get to see in custom packs. If you like the 10-of-everything levels specifically how they are done in the Fun rank, I can see where you're coming from; most X-of-everything levels from custom packs however unfortunately remind me more of Tame than of Fun.
That said, one thing I keep pointing out repeatedly which Fun doesn't teach the player either is standard skill tricks. The three builder wall has to be figured out by the player himself on "I have a cunning plan", which also does a terrible job at isolating that trick, because it is also possible to block and free the blocker with a miner (which is how my father and I always tried to solve the level back in the day, running into execution difficulties easily, even though we knew it was possible). So you can't even claim the redeeming factor of "the player is bound to figure it out at some point" here. Digging and building to turn a lemming around has to be figured out on "Postcard to Lemmingland"; trapping lemmings in a digger pit on "Heaven can wait (we hope!)".
And sadly, many packs waste the player's time with standard tutorial levels for the different single skills - a type of level which you get to play loads of with every new pack you attempt - but then proceed to demanding obscure tricks from the player; some of which most of us probably know less from actual playing, and more from browsing the forum or from watching replays.
But most of all I take issue with the idea that there's a set of books, songs and games that are "pop" enough to make reference to, and if I like different things, I'm not in your cool club. Why shouldn't I have fun as well?
That's not what I'm proposing; I certainly don't want there to be an authority on what's "hip" enough, hence my comments about individualisation and a smaller degree of overlapping knowledge among users
. Take the biblical quotes for example that make up a majority of the level titles in the "Basic" rank in "Lemmicks": Arty understood them, of course, but overall, in the more secular world we live in today, there are going to be less people who understand those references than a couple of decades ago.
I simply suggest: When you're picking a level title, and you're deciding to include a reference to anything,
ask yourself how high the chance is for anyone from our comparatively small community to get that reference.
For example, with the Game of Thrones-allusions I included in Paralems, I thought that probability was reasonably high. There have still been people who didn't get those references, and that's completely fine; I simply didn't want to refer to anything from my more "niche" interests that was bound not to be understood to begin with.
Other creators have made Star Wars- and Pirates of the Carribbean levels, too, and those are easy to identify as such.
Hence, I selected the level / song titles for Lemmings World Tour by the criteria of overall popularity, the degree to which the title matched the level mechanically or visually, and only afterwards came personal preference. Many of the titles are songs I have never listened to; but if I had based the titles on my personal favourites, it would have been full of lesser known metal bands and Eurovision Song Contest entries
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While the latter would have been a great way to visit lots of "places" and put many different flags in my levels, not only would it have turned Lemmings World Tour more into a "Lemmings Europe Tour", but also the whole purpose of having song-based titles would have been defeated, because to the majority of players, these simply would have been generic titles like on any other level.
A little mystery can be nice, of course, but I usually disperse it at the latest in the post-level text as a "reward" for solving the level. It's quite weird to have to go to a YouTube LP of the pack you just played and look for the creator's comments under some video, just to get all the secret references.
But perhaps this is just because, since I'm generally more on IchoTolot's page with regard to "a pack should be able to stand on its own", that translates to the level titles for me, as well .I do agree with Nessy that strange level titles can open up the doors to spark your interest in new things. But whenever that is my goal, I try to actively invite the player into "my world". Unexplained insider references often have an "excluding" aspect about them.
SEB Lems is a good example of this. From the pack name to the choices of the ranks to the level titles to the music choice, everything makes sense if you know what it's about, but if you don't, at least to me, it just seems like a bit of a random mess - not with regard to the level quality, Flopsy
, just with regard to the overall structure of the pack, especially considering the bonus ranks with removed levels, and levels added in from other packs. For example, the rank names don't have that typical "increasing intensity" fashion, they're a seemingly arbitrary mixture of nouns and adjectives.
And since what this pack is actually about is kept a secret until the very end of the pack, when the shoe finally drops, at least for me, it was a bit like: "Really? That's all?"
(I actually found out about it by accident while typing a forum post.)
But lumping all 10-of-everything levels together and calling them all "filler" -- that's unwarranted.
I've said in the other thread you linked to that my main gripe with these levels is
how they are created :
In the case of the Fun levels, most of these are "pre-runs" of later levels which were deliberately made easier. So actually, the more difficult version was created first, and then reducing the difficulty just to have another level for a lower rank really just seems like filler to me. As if the creator couldn't be bothered to come up with separate easier puzzles and decides to go for a 2-for-1 instead, simply because they don't know what else to do for the first rank.
Making an easy 10-of-everything version of an initially more restricted puzzle
requires just a couple of seconds of additional work for the creator (basically just setting the 8 standard skills to "10"),
while taking the player disproportionally more time, forcing him to click through a - usually very large - level that barely has anything interesting to offer or to teach, there's little to be lost and little to be taught:
One reason for the difficulty spike in Tricky is that Fun reinforces "noob strategies" in these 10-of-everything levels, mainly by providing an abundance of blockers and builders: New players become completely dependent on the idea of trapping the crowd with blockers, because it's always possible in Fun, and then they don't know what to do when it's suddenly not possible anymore
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Why are we still clinging onto the idea that every pack should have difficulty ranks and that the first should be beginner level?
Well, that sounds like you advising against X-of-everything levels now, doesn't it?
Because they usually take exactly those beginner level spots in the larger packs, sometimes they make up an entire rank. So if you leave them out, the density of X-of-everything levels is going to be reduced drastically.
The simple answer is: We certainly don't need to have beginner levels in every pack, and smaller packs like "Lemmings Migration" or "Raylems" get started with more puzzly stuff right away.
"Six Days Without An Accident". On the surface the title has NOTHING to do with the level, but under the surface? The "Six Days" part is 100% random, but the level deals with climbers that can easily climb over obstacles and die. This is the "Accidents" the level is referring to. I think it stands out more decent without having to relate it to the level too literally. Too literally would be naming the level "Climber Accidents" or something. Which one do you think has more of a punch?
I'm completely on-board with you here, Nessy
! Actually, "Climber Accidents" would be the more generic title to me, simply because that feels like forcing a game-mechanic word into it. Instead, you picked one which clearly had some relation to the level (I was just thinking of a mine or steel work, due to it featuring the Machine tileset), but at the same time didn't give anything away about the solution.
The Troll rank in Casualemmings was just me getting pent-up trash out of my system.
@nin10doadict: Actually, some of these levels can be quite fun when you have to rapidly spam one specific skill over and over again. I take more issue with repetitive levels when they're very slow on top of that.
The classical example would be builder fests, because you have to babysit the builders and constantly hammer on the spacebar, waiting for them to finish. Or where you let climbers climb into a shaft and then bomb - you always have to wait for the next climber to arrive first. So it's actually more levels like that one massive sewer shaft level from CasuaLemmings, with a bunch of crocodiles and 50+ stoners, that tend to get dragging for me here
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In contrast, when I just need to select a skill and then frag my mouse to bits, I can pretty much do all these clicks quickly, back-to-back, and continue immediately.
Generally speaking, a level becomes more dragging and boring the more time there is between figuring out the solution on a conceptual level, and putting that solution into practice. That's the whole point of the NeoLemmix community trying to reduce execution-based difficulty.
I do have another turnoff though:- terrain that's deliberately visually confusing (again relating to ergonomics here), lots of small, repeating elements that are intentionally designed to make the player's eyes hurt - specifically: Mazes of tiny terrain stripes where you can barely spot where the lemming is going to walk or fall through.
Contrary to "easier versions of later levels with X-of-everything", the burden is equally distributed here on creator and player: These huge mazes are usually just as tedious to create as they are to play. I had to create one such level for the Groupie rank, because imitating what other people have done is the whole point of that rank, but I still despise these levels in general, both as a creator and a player.
I've spoken before about
"hiding in plain sight" vs. "hiding in obstructed sight": Puzzling is about "which piece goes where". A level is a map with several obstacles, where you're cycling through in your head how to overcome each of those obstacles. My greatest admiration has always gone to levels where you think "This looks so simple, how is it possible that I'm always one skill short?"
(Examples: Nepster's "The Block-Store" or "A Study in Scarlet")
Mazes of tiny, pixel-thin terrain stripes however are designed to make your eyes lose track every time you look elsewhere in the level.
Making terrain visually deceptive this way to me really isn't much better than making traps visually deceptive.
Oftentimes, these levels even look more complicated than they actually are (I'm going to cite Colorful Arty's "Labyrinth of Lucifer" from SubLems or Nepster's "Don't cross me!" as examples here).
Hence, these levels are the exact opposite of the aforementioned, admirable ones:
They pretend to be complicated, but actually aren't.
Genius levels look like they're simple, but actually aren't.
And thereby make the player feel rightfully stupid for not being able to see the solution
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