I was going for the Game Boy Advance.
I played the game boy color version for, like, two minutes and had to pu... stop.
Heh, yeah, the GBC port is definitely a bit lacking.
Though I believe I already saw a fanmade GBA port out, though it's a work in progress.? Unfortunately I can't find the URL for the moment.
I was thinking that the whole gameplay could be made easier if there is not a 'mouse' controlled across the whole board, but rather a lemming focus, which only jumps from lemming to lemming (i.e. like if you use the arrow keys on the windows desktop, you can select among the icons).
That's definitely a reasonable approach.? Just make sure the player can still have a method to scroll the screen left and right.
the original levels could be reused 1:1 - Since the screen is 160 pixels high, and lemmings levels seem to be that high, there even is no up/down scrolling necessary (but it would require tucking the controls into the corner and making them transparent).
Correct, levels in the original game and ports do have a vertical dimension of 160 pixels.
As for status info, you'd want to display (at a minimum) the following:
- time remaining
- currently selected skill
- number of lemmings saved so far
- number of lemming still out in the level
The original game also shows a whole toolbar of the 8 skills, the current release rate, and number of lemmings still out in the level.? On handheld ports, these are handled in a number of ways:
- many keep the skills toolbar, but it doesn't show up on the screen unless you hold down a button, which then brings it up from say the bottom of the screen or something.? Releasing the button and the toolbar goes into hiding again.
- I believe the Atari Lynx port displays the number of lemmings saved so far right at the top of each exit
- you can probably tug the time limit and currently select skill somewhere at the top of the screen.? The very top of the screen tends to be least reached by lemmings.
I am still not quite decided whether to just rip all the graphics and data off the old game or simply reuse the old files and write converters or something (i.e. whether to preconvert and get bitmaps in gba format or convert in runtime).
It would be great if somebody had ripped all data. *winkwink*
Well it isn't really "ripping" since it's a computer game so the various data are mostly in different files.
But yes, especially for DOS Lemmings (and to a smaller extend WinLemm), we have figured out how to interpret its graphics data.? We (or others) have even written programs that can display individual graphics, where you can screen-capture them.? For things like terrain and object graphics, Nuntar actually already have them collected in sets of BMPs in order to use this in the DOS lemmings clone "Cheapo".
