Question 1: am I allowed to put copyrighted music in the game? Right now, each level has a unique music track that plays on it, but lots of them are copyrighted in some way.
Question 2: Should I up the amount of levels in the 5 main difficulties to 25? Doing so would make a better learning curve, but it would mean SubLems would not be available for a longer time.
Question 3: What advice can you give a relatively amateur Lemmings level designer. Plenty of my levels are lacking in the scenery department, and most of my levels are quite small.
Question 4: Are any of my difficulty names used by other packs? If so, I have some backup names.
1. Several packs have done this without problem. It may be best to stick to older stuff, and in particular, avoid full versions of commercial music (instead sticking to re-created instrumentals, video game music, etc). If you meant in terms of forum rules, no, we don't outright forbid it.
2. This is entirely something you have to decide on yourself. In a couple of cases, I've set myself higher targets then ended up reducing the count later (Lemmings Plus III, and the now-withdrawn Doomsday Lemmings II). Note that it's also fine to have a different number of levels in each rank; several packs have done so.
3. For scenery, the official games actually do a very good job of this most of the time, so take some inspiration from them. Do remember to be careful that your decoration doesn't add backroutes (on the other hand, one thing that has been done in the past is making stuff look like scenery when it's part of the solution, or vice versa). Small levels are fine, and are often preferred; making hard levels that remain high in quality is a difficult task, and out of the packs I've played, the only author who seems to be able to
consistently make levels that are large, but still very good, is IchoTolot. As Icho mentioned, reading through Level Design is a good idea; if you didn't want to do that for now (or at all), some general tips are:
- Don't have time limits unless it's either (a) to prevent backroutes, or (b) the main source (or one of the main sources) of the level's difficulty. If the level is already challenging without a time limit, and a time limit isn't needed to prevent backroutes, do not add a time limit. This is especially true for larger levels. This also, to some extent, applies to "pseudo-time limits" as well, such as having to rush to build a
splatform; yes, splatform levels can be very genius indeed, but either some leeway should be given, or the level should be set up such that if the right path is found, the timing will always work out correctly.
- Avoid designs that could be thought of as "several levels packed into one". If there are seperate parts, then these parts should have to work together, or how to divide the skills between them should be a major part of the puzzle, or something like that.
- Avoid misleading designs. If it looks like steel, it should be steel. If it doesn't look like steel, it shouldn't be steel. If you've placed a trap, make it visible, or at least hint at its presence, if possible. Don't hide exits under terrain - and even more so, do not have a visible exit that's impossible to get to, with a second exit hidden in terrain.
- Since you're designing for SuperLemmini, avoid needing precise or hard-to-judge moves as much as possible. In NeoLemmix and Lix, this doesn't matter so much because if the player makes a mistake, they can just use backwards frameskips or save states to go back and correct it, and can use framestepping to help assign at the correct position. SuperLemmini has no such mechanic; even though it does have replay, this is still very time consuming, and depending on how precise the assignment has to be, it may be almost trial and error trying to get it right. (In general, I'm not sure how great an idea it is to use SuperLemmini. I'm not overly fond of it myself, and I think it's likely there's a reason why, despite having been around for about as long as NeoLemmix has, it has only a tiny fraction of the amount of content NL does.)
- The number one guideline to keep in mind though is that all guidelines are recommendations, not rules. If breaking them results in a better level, or thematic concerns contradict the guidelines,
break them.
Since SuperLemmini doen't have much content, there aren't really any "conventions" for it yet, other than the general level design ones.
4. Don't worry about it. I'd recommend, avoid re-using ones from the official games (unless you're completely copying a set of them - ie: if your ranks are "Fun", "Tricky", "Taxing", "Mayhem" that's probably okay, but don't randomly have one called "Mayhem" among several original names), and avoid re-using ones that you yourself have used in other packs. Don't worry so much if someone else may already have used it; since otherwise it becomes a game of "first in, first served". With that being said, you may, however, if you discover one of your names has been used, check whether your usage of it is quite different to the other person's, to avoid confusing people. If one person uses "Wacky" for a Tame-like rank, you may want to not use it for your Havoc-like rank. But at the end of the day, what people are interested in most is your levels, not your rank names.