WE HAVE OUR FIRST COMPLETED RANK!
And surprisingly, it's Genius! It's kinda funny considering at one point, all the other ranks were like 50%+ and Genius was lagging behind with only like 3 or 4 levels made.
Might take a bit to come up with some good levels for Cunning, but I can throw together pretty good levels for the lower ranks in a matter of minutes each. So we might even see a release today. =O (By my time zone, which gives about 8 hours until the day's over.) If not, it'll almost certianly be tomorrow.
(Don't hold me to that though, just in case.)
I had actually at one point been considering making it 18 levels per rank (for 90 levels total) instead of 20 each, but... bit late now, I'd have to drop levels... xD Anyway, only 8 levels to go now - 2 Nice, 3 Cheeky, 2 Sneaky and 1 Cunning. =D
EDIT: And thanks to an epic stroke of genius (or should I say stroke of cunning?
) I just had, Cunning is now also complete! I also pumped out an extra Sneaky level in the meantime too. So only 2 Nice, 3 Cheeky and 2 Sneaky to go! 7 levels!!! Since these are the easier ones, it's very likely that we're only hours away from release. =P (I do plan to go through all the levels once they're finished and, apart from obviously checking I haven't left any half-finished (it's happened before) or modified them and rendered them impossible, also check if any levels need a bit of extra decorating. But that won't take too long - I've already saved replays for most levels as I've made them, I think I have like 5 levels that I don't have replays for, all of them in Nice/Cheeky/Sneaky.)
Taking a bit of a break for now (just for an hour or two), since I often find when I try to rapidly pump out lots of levels (as I tend to do when I get excited about a pack being near completion), I tend to make very sucky levels, so having a rest might help the last few levels be up to the same standard as the majority of the pack. (For an example of what happens when I'm trying to finish off a pack quickly, have a look at Danger 9 from LPDOS or Medi 8 from the *OLDER* versions of LPDOS (not the newer ones where that level's been replaced with a better one).)
I would say the levels in LPII are developed (overall, not each specific level) to an even higher standard than those in LPDOS, which is already pretty highly thought of from what I can gather. Plus, almost every level is unique - even by the absolute strictest of definitions, there's only 6 levels that could be considered "repeats", and none of those 6 are repeats to the same degree as LPDOS's or the original games' repeats; they could be considered more along the lines of the situation with Fun 16 and Taxing 6 in Lemmings 3D. Also, there's no outright remakes of older levels (unless you count Rolling Rampage, but that was never an official level in any pack, just a rejected (albeit accidentally rejected) LPDOS V7 level), though there are some cases of levels that are clearly inspired by older ones.
EDIT: Back to work again, and Sneaky is now complete! Two more levels each for Nice and Cheeky... this shouldn't take too long. Maybe an hour or so to make the levels, and another hour or two to go through and check everything's working as it should (and add a bit of decoration to a few levels)...
EDIT: And, Nice is now complete too! And only one level remains before Cheeky is complete - meaning WE ARE ONLY ONE LEVEL AWAY FROM LPII BEING FINISHED (apart from a few last-minute touchups, and fixing any backroutes that come up).
I plan to do a limited number of releases - basically, I'll update the player as many times as nessecary if bugs pop up, but for the level designs, counting from the full release (ie: excluding the demos), there will be no more than three backroute fix updates - any backroutes that still survive after this remain for good. In addition to this, each individual level will only be fixed up to twice. Also, I'll probably set some sort of timeframe within which these updates can occur, and any backroutes not found by the time it runs out also remain. It's just that, while I do want to cut down on them, I don't want to be forever updating the pack, eventually I want to say "okay, this is absolutely finalised and there will be no further modifications or updates", like with LPDOS at V7.