Here are some replays for NeoLemmix levels. (recorded with V1.43)
I am not such a fan of this level. A few places where the skill assignments need to be more precise than necessary (e.g. the builder assigned to the climber in the middle of the level) and for such a big level not enough interaction between the two lemmings (i.e. only the one-way-wall at the beginning and the small gap with the stacking in the middle).
Hailfire Peaks: Fairly sure, that this is a glaring backroute.
(I haven't yet played the other level, because I forgot to download the style)
The Wishing Well: Looks pretty backrouty. Currently not a good level and more of a 1-lemming level instead of a 2-lemming level.
Heaven and Earth: Not yet solved, but please make it more obvious that bashing from the left does not work. Currently the terrain is terribly misleading.
Future Temple: Nice level and not too hard. With this style, I always confuse normal terrain with steel (because steel pieces have so many different looks). This is of course not your fault, but it was still annoying for me, because my first two solutions didn't work due to this mistake.
Ursa Miner? Ursa MAJOR!: Looks nice, but apart from the trick at the very beginning, the level is pretty standard and requires rather precise timing at the end.
The yellow trap is pretty visible, but the brown one... :devil::sick::evil::sick::devil::sick::evil::sick::devil:
I tried "The Machine" and found a solution, only that suddenly one lemming was missing :lem-mindblown:. Ok, framestep back until finding the trap. So I had to find a new approach. Two minutes later I had another one, but unfortunately I just forgot about the trap again! When the trap surprised my a third time another five minutes later, I rage-quit the level! Then I tried "Harkonnen Force" and solved it... or so I thought! More than half of my lemmings vanished again somewhere when they really should have walked straight into the exits! Again I completely missed half of all traps in this level.
Summary: This &@!* trap must become a LOT more visible! Until this is done, I will never ever play any Dune style level again.
Edit: Now with replays as attachment.
Just caught your backroute just in time before I released V3!
Here are my solutions to "Harkonnen Force" and "Bird Knight", and an extra one for you, Colorful Arty - a solution to V4 of Hailfire Peaks (which is pretty much my solution from before):
I think this is a backroute because you gave a very big clue in your video, IchTolot, that all three traps in the "Command Centre" have to be disabled. This one skips the yellow teleporter completely, but uses all the skills.
This was a bit of a self-imposed challenge. I decided to solve the level without using any Diggers!
One possible solution for patching IchTolot's backroute, if you wanted to patch it, is to put a fire pit at the base of that platform to the left of the exit, in that nook between the snow drift and the post, so any digger that goes there meets his demise.
Bulletrides level:
After trying to solve Bulletrides level with getting the glider yesterday (this couldn't be just a redherring), I tried it with my old start without the glider again this morning annnnd with a different miner positioning and a stacker in a different place I managed to solve it finally. I still don't know if this is intended as the glider stays a mystery and if it is not nessesary I recommend removing it. Looking into the forum again I saw Crane also solved it the same way, this speaks for the glider not beeing nessesary and I would still propose it's removal.
My intended solution has the climber go over the small stump rather than bash through it, and then to bash through it on the way back, but honestly that variant is so minor that it doesn't warrant a patch. Saying that though...
When I solve it, I'm deliberately inefficient with the floater, and I still finish in time. That was one of my test criteria for this level. You will run out of time though if you get the climber and floater the wrong way around.
I also beat Arty's levels which were both fun. I especially liked the Banjo-Kazooie themed one. I beat Wishing well, but my solution was very similar to Arty's latest back-route solution. Still a cool level. I really like the moss. Attached is the Harkonnen Force replay. I won't attach the rest of the replays because they're all very similar to ones already posted.
On Harkonnen Force, I manage to bypass completely the trap at the start.
"Complications": Much better now, even though the timing at the end is much stricter than it needs to be.
"Lego my lemmings!": Not sure this is completely intended, because I don't use the delay by the gray platforms at the top in any way. Moreover placing the blocker is really non-trivial, because one cannot place him onto the blue slope and the lemmings in the crowd tend to produce few groups of very close lemmings (so if one blocks the first lemming, the next still moves through). But a nice idea regardless.
"Hailfire Peaks": Very nice level. One minor complaint though: The blocker to turn the miner has to be placed very precisely.
"The Wishing Well": Still looks like a backroute, though it isn't as bad a backroute as the one for V1.
"Inseparables": Excellent level! :thumbsup:
"The New Compression Method": Saving 7 lix is easy. I just don't know how to time it, so that the squisher doen't finish killing the last lix before all the other lix arrive.
First fo all: The new trap is much better! 8-)
"The Machine": Very clever level. One minor complaint: Currently it is not obvious that gliders starting from the top platform will not reach the button on the other side, but hit the platform below and turn around.
"Harkonnen Force": The timing for the first two climbers who walk into the teleporters requires too much precision, because they must not be too far away (so that they use different teleporters), but cannot be too close together (otherwise the digger will be too fast). And the left third of the level isn't really used at all, apart from making the lemming walk a lot more at the beginning.
"Flying Squirrels": Nice visuals, but did you really want that precision-batting and tumbler-imploding?
"Bird Knight": Very nice level! :thumbsup:
In case you made the style yourself: Even though the level looks quite nice, I just would prefer a slightly darker background resp. lighter terrain pieces, especially as the background consists just of slightly darker versions of usual terrain pieces. With the current color choices, I had to concentrate too much on distinguishing stuff. And at first, I took the blocks hanging from the chains (e.g. directly left of the left hatch) to be steel.
Complications: Cute tricks. Very hard. Icho told me that you removed the red-herring glider. The level easily musters enough difficulty from good core ideas. Long level, difficult to assess how much leeway there is with skills near the beginning.
The Wishing Well: Feels like a heavily fixed level. You entice lots of fun things to try, the fun ideas look working almost until the end, but then fail for un-fun reasons. If something is going to fail, I'd love to have that more obvious earlier. I can rule out some ideas by reason. But almost everything, I have to try it to be sure that it doesn't work. Bonus points for the dirt set, lovely set, I'm happy every time I see it.
Future Temple: Cute level. Excellent display of the mandatory permanent skills at the beginning, it's hard to miss the permanents. A focused level, the skills accomplish wildly different and unexpected things. Yet not too hard. Like like like.
The Machine: Ruthless exploit of a psychological blind spot. The symmetry makes this harder, not easier. This level wins the special prize for most surprising spike in difficulty. The Zendo player in me is delighted.
Lego my lemmings: I solved this first try, and aked Icho afterwards whether the flickering trees were fire. But that's a tileset issue, not a level issue. It's probably okay, because my hunch was that the trees were fire. Using walker to cancel basher feels like a waste of walker at first, but the solution feels good with this, it undermines a wrong assumption gently. These little moments of enjoyment is what I seek in Lemmings.
Heaven and Earth: Very nice. Excellent and hard decisions where to use cloner, walker, blocker, when all would somehow work. I remember how I raged about NL, it didn't let me assign miner even though I wouldn't remove any steel. This level was soothing, that's strong.
Hailfire Peaks: Lovely blockers. Crucial height difference of a single pixel at the right, that looks unnecessarily precise, but may be okay in practice. Cute alcoves around the screen border, they never feel cramped, but cozy. Lemmings needs more of this.
Ursa Miner? Ursa MAJOR: Cute digging. I thought of your avatar the entire time during this level. The level is cute, and the dragon is too cute. Level feels very gronklingish, lots of attention to small-scale physics details, but never dishonest. Icho puts one screen full of decoration next to his levels? Who needs an extra screen, you can lay out everything comfortably in a fourth of the screen size, and still have massive space for deco.
Harkonnen Force: Very large, strange vertical scrolling, a daunting appearance. Eventually, the action concentrates on the small area, and becomes far less confusing than I suspected.
Bird Knight: I want to disable the background on this. I had to guess what is solid and what isn't, even though the answer has never affected my planning. The bashers are in short supply, I had luck and didn't waste bashers. This rewards sending multiple climbers, even though you could get away with fewer, that's fun. Then we watched Colorful Arty enjoying 30 minutes of Superlemmini on youtube, that was also fun.
Edit by namida: SPOILER TAGS!
-- Simon
I haven't looked at Wishing Well v14 yet, but I have watched the v13 intended route at Icho's.
Remove the dig-build near the exit. That's not the core idea anyway, but a supplementary idea. The main idea is that you send the floater down, then back up, and down again. When you remove the dig-build at the exit, you can remove the digger, which is critical for my v13 backroute.
Alternatively, put one-ways on the wall at the exit. Then the dig-build becomes obvious, and you have sacrificed this extra idea again, to fix and focus on the main idea.
Bonus: When you trim the skillset, the level will allow fewer things that seem to work, but then fail for technical reasons. That was my main critique from my previous post. 8-)
-- Simon
One easy to fix back route and one possibly intended solution.
I would move the exit to the left a little bit to make it slightly more visible that you can build to turn around there now.
It turns out that my builder placement on the grassy patch on the bottom right side of the left island is a bit further to the right than that of the intended solution, so you could try erasing a bit of that terrain to block that backroute. As for Simon's backroute - I suggest either adding one-way left arrows in the first wall, or adding a rock trap
Use Pickup skills! My backroute requires all six builders, none of which are needed to build over the lake. If you exchange a builder from the skillset for pickup skill and place it next to the lake, I have no chance to backroute your level
Hope this helps.
I had a go at all the NeoLemmix levels now as well. After talking to Icho it seems like the latest released nxp doesn't have the latest versions of the styles, making the exit in zanzindorf's level not work and the traps in the dune tileset hard to spot.
I'm one skill short of solving BulletRide's complications, and I didn't save a replay after gathering everyone in front of the exit in Bird Knight, but I have replays for all other levels.
Comments:
[V6] BulletRide's "Complications" (NeoLemmix)
Very tough one, and the start is still not clear to me. But really nice interaction between the swimmer and the climber as far as I can see. I'll try it again at some point.
This was quite fun. Some of the terrain is a bit strange and the skill placements feel unnatural (like the builder at the top), but I guess that's a side-effect of backroute fixing, as other parts of the level look very nice. The cross at the right is a bit misleading as it looks like it'd turn the climber around, the level could make that a bit clearer here. But overall I enjoyed figuring this one out. Time limit was a bit tight at the end; is it needed for backroute prevention?
I like how simplistic this one is with just 5 skills. Still it takes a little while to figure out, I was having a lot of fun with this one. Only gripe is that depending on exact placement of the basher/blocker, the blocker sometimes goes into the traps. Oh, and I feel like the traps aren't as visible as they could be, but that's an issue with the tile set.
Really fun this one. I didn't realize that by platforming at the top, you create a safe fall due to the updraft. Then the level was more straightforward than expected. But it still has the nice timing falling into place at the end which is very satisfying.
[V3] Colorful Arty's "Lego my lemmings!" (NeoLemmix)
This was one of the easier ones, but still fun to play.
Definitely one of my favourites. At the beginning it seems like there are almost no options at all, but then there are surprisingly many things to try out. Took me a while, and I was thoroughly enjoying it. I'm glad Simon made me aware of the time limit from the start, still once or twice I had the level end abruptly because the timer ran out. Not a big fan of that happening.
[V5] Colorful Arty's "Hailfire Peaks" (NeoLemmix)
I feel like the terrain looks a bit messy in this one. The level itself really it built around the terrain, but there are not many options for the skill placements. I took a little while to realize the basher trick, even though I had used it in a level of my own before. The miner placements together with the blocker are a bit annoying to get right.
Really cute level. Looked impossible for a moment, but once I saw the main trick it didn't take long to piece it together. I really like how compact the level is.
The level isn't bad itself, but it caused me a lot of frustration which is mostly the tileset's fault. The version from the first post still doesn't have the markings for the trap, so it looks like terrain. That messed up my plans. Then the teleporter destinations look almost like the teleporters, so I thought they were two-way and was planning a solution around that. That messed up my plans again. Then it also wasn't quite clear where the trigger area of the fire is, whether you can actually dig down off-center. Once I actually saw the level as it was it wasn't so hard. Nothing completely novel and the middle felt a bit like filler, but an ok level.
I like the visuals of this one, and the level itself plays nicely too. It looks like you have plenty of skills, but you need at least a little bit of planning to make sure you don't run out.