Every time I work on a pack, I try to get a little creative with the first couple of levels. It's somewhat of an unspoken rule that the first levels should have some kind of tutorial character, except for very short packs which are deliberately only made for people who have played a lot of other content already, so they don't need to be taught stuff and you don't want to waste their time.
For the average Joe however, especially old lemmings players who might come into contact with NeoLemmix skills for the first time, introductory levels make sense.
For Paralems, I did the "revive original levels with new skills" thing.
For Pit Lems, I combined several skills into few levels, like teaching the destructive skills, then the creative skills, lethal skills, permanent skills, etc. Quickly however, it turned into "teaching the player certain tricks you can do with these skills".
Lemmings 3D had an own Practice rank below Fun, which you could just skip if you wanted to to.
And finally, the NeoLemmix introduction pack shows that effectively, you could spend an entire pack just teaching things to people, from mechanics to skills to objects to tricks... But I still wouldn't feel comfortable just pointing everyone to the introduction pack and leaving my own packs without a "learning curve"
.
I'm thinking of teaching the skills pairwise in the next regular (i.e. non-gimmick
) pack I make... because single skill levels tend to be either ridiculously easy or insanely hard. After all, most skills don't have the extreme versatility a builder or a stoner have. And things like the cloner to a lot in combination with other skills, but next to nothing on their own.
So how many intro levels do you aim for with your packs, and more importantly: What do you like to teach the player (and what not)? Skills, objects, tricks and skill combinations?