Regarding the workarounds for proposed behaviours, one thing I have to say is that the more complex they get, the more they scream "backroute potential!" to me...
Exactly!
The more skills I have to provide to enable a workaround - especially when it comes to skills as powerful and backroute-prone as Walkers and Stoners, which is the case in all of my examples for substituting the Slider - the more likely this is to invite backroutes indeed.
Back to IchoTolot:
And you again don't see the possibility to adapt the terrain for these kind of things. The designer has total control and can design these things to not be precise. You don't need a new skill for it.
Of course the designer can adapt everything. But let me phrase this the other way round: The absence of the Slider
forces the designer to adapt the terrain in a way he/she might not want to. If a certain skill behaviour is not possible in the first place and you keep adapting the terrain to make up for that, then at what point would we just say this is a completely different solution than intended?
- Make the gap narrow enough that 1 spear does the job.
- Platformers are very slow, a throw is faster.
It's interseting that WillLem called those two things a good case for the Spear Thrower, because both sound like horribly precise execution difficulty to me.
The spear would probably be just one pixel in diameter and a couple of pixels in length. Meaning, if you want to make a gap narrow enough for just a spear to be thrown through it, it would have to be a 1-pixel gap (well, if that doesn't sound like fun). But I think you are referring to the gap the spear is supposed to lead
across here. So let's say that's 12 or 16 pixels. How deep does the spear stick in the terrain it lands in? If this is just one pixel too far, there will be a gap remaining on the side from which the spear was thrown.
But I know by now that WillLem likes a good bit of execution difficulty.
In turn, the points he brought up right under that quote actually refer to something different, that is non-lethality:
This is a very good case for the Spear-thrower: where the Bomber is an instant destructive skill, it would be good to have an instantly constructive skill that's a) non-sacrificial, and b) big enough to instantly close a large(ish) gap. I can definitely see the potential in this idea.
A while ago, WillLem suggested non-lethal versions of both the Bomber (the Lightsaberer) and the Stoner (don't remember the name of that one). This would essentially be the latter, but wider than the Stoner, more comparable to the Lix cuber, which creates an entire block, rather than just a narrow piece of terrain in the shape of a Lix. The added difference would be that it can work at a distance, as you said.
Still, the question remains: How do you get a spear to span across two chunks of terrain of equal height (like a Platformer bridge)? The spear would have to be thrown over the lemming's shoulder, i.e. from a higher altitude than the lemming's feet.
Does that mean it always requires an additional Builder or Jumper to get on top of a "bridge" created by the Spear Thrower in the first place? That would mean that the core application of the Spear Thrower would only be good in conjunction with another skill, whereas the Slider in its core application is of similar power as the Floater, and then some.
What I actually find a much more interesting case in favour of the Spear Thrower is this:
A spear must be thrown into already present terrain. That means the crowd will either hit a wall and turn or get on a platform and walk along.
Also you need to position the thrower first, getting that done is another challenge.
A stoner mostly just breaks the fall.
This "existing terrain" part is an interesting limitation compared to the oftentimes broken Stoner.
However, I'm generally a bit surprised about your several remarks here that almost seem to imply you like the Spear Thrower for... execution difficulty?
- Make the gap narrow enough that 1 spear does the job.
- Platformers are very slow, a throw is faster.
[. . .]
Also you need to position the thrower first, getting that done is another challenge.
Those things (speed-based solutions and proper positioning) are precisely my main objection against all the projectile skills from Lemmings 2: The Tribes! The Thrower, the Spear Thrower, the Bazooker, the Mortar, and of course the Archer (Sports 10, remember
), even thought that latter one has fortunately already been ruled out.
The Laser Blaser at least creates a constant beam that is much easier to navigate and predict than a loose projectile.
Of course, as you said, we will have skill shadows for this in the end. But if the presence of skill shadows were an excuse for deliberately increasing execution difficulty, the NeoLemmix community wouldn't be so adamant about continuing to criticise execution difficulty in general. Personally, I like the idea of more movement skills: we have more than enough terrain creation/destruction skills. Sure, they might be giving the game increasingly more "parkour potential", and I get why you might be against that idea. But ultimately, maybe the 20th skill should also bring with it a sense of balance.
And - level designers can still choose to limit the number of movement skills available in a given level, so we won't completely lose the need to find inventive workarounds. A lot of the original levels do just that: "sure, we could give you a blocker or some extra builders here, but we're not going to: find a workaround!"
An interesting new perspective!
I admit that for the longest time, I was so keen on getting the balance between constructive and destructive skills right that I had completely forgotten about the fact that "movement skills" might establish themselves as a separate third category. While there is a certain overlap between movement skills and athletic skills (and a standard permanent Slider would also fall into that category), the Jumper, Shimmier, Walker, and technically also the Cloner show that movement skills don't need to be restricted to permanent applications.
Assigning a Slider is perhaps more "creative" in the sense that more can be done with the Slider state: assigning to Jumper, transitioning to Shimmier, landing facing the wall (I think this seems to be the current assumption, anyway).
If there are two ways to get the same job done, but one of them offers even just one more possibility, which are you going to favour?
This is precisely why in the "suggest your own 10-skill panel" thread ("Defining the new classic 10 skills" was kind of re-purposed to that recently), I dropped the Floater in favour of the
Glider - because the Glider can accomplish the same thing as a Floater (when it comes to saving a lemming from a single lethal drop) if you just assign it late enough.
A Glider can only "backfire" due to its diagonal trajectory once it has already been assigned, by taking a lemming too far and leaving the player no option to delay the opening of the parachute - but then again, the same can be said for the Floater: If you need to survive a straight drop first, and at the next drop, there is a gap or water there so that you would need a Glider instead, the Floater can blow up in the player's face just as much as the Glider can.
In general, I'd even argue that the better a skill gets one specific job done - and only that job - the less puzzle potential it has. Namely, the Floater, the Disarmer, and possibly the Swimmer. But the Swimmer still has the most puzzle potential of these three, and even that skill has been called obsolete by Proxima!So instead of providing these powerful skills to the player that get the job done too easily - like e.g. also the Walker gets the job of turning a lemming around done too easily - the designer can give the player something less powerful and, as WillLem said, tell them to "find a workaround!"
Basically, the only difference is:
- IchoTolot suggests to use workarounds with other skills to replace the Slider
- I suggest using the Slider to create workarounds that can replace Floaters and Gliders
But since I think we established that the number of different things you can do with the Floater is more limited, my argument is that the Floater is the one more worthy of being "replaced" by other skills. (And no, of course this does not mean "cull the Floater from the game", but simply "maybe level designers should use it less frequently". I apply the same logic to using Stackers more frequently than Blockers, at least when it comes to crowd control. Blockers can have very advanced uses, but that's usually in levels where the crowd can't be contained at all, and the Blocker has to be freed again in the end.)