I guess this might be somewhere that NL and Lix differ a bit in philosophy - both agree that the puzzle, not the execution, should be the difficulty; but Lix's ideal philosophy (with some non-conforming elements retained due to tradition / existing content) seems to be "the puzzle is manipulating the terrain, the lixes are a tool for doing so", whereas NeoLemmix's is "the puzzle is manipulating the lemmings, altering the terrain is one thing that can be achieved via this". Obviously, both of these are oversimplifications, but I do get the feeling there's a slight divide along these lines.
Strange. I would have expected it exactly the other way around, given Lix's skillset optimization to multiplayer (the cultural baggage of the skill choice necessarily manifests in puzzle design and shapes the community) and NL's focus on big pixels. But I guess the already many movement skills of NL have also contributed their part to the culture.
But really, the fundamental design is the same:
- The puzzle/environment is always manipulating the lemmings, in both games.
- The player, through the hands of the lemmings, modifies the puzzle/environment.
Since terrain is everywhere, and lemmings are in many places, the most common modifications of a lemming to the environment is to change the terrain, or to affect other lemmings. Further ways (besides these main two ways) also possible, such as disabling traps, swimming through water, ...
In Lix, the game merely
happens be even more about the terrain than in NL, this is a side effect of the deliberate lack of gadgets and gadget-bypass skills.
Inter-lemming-action (treating the assignee as part of the environment for the lemming that is really affected) is hard to get right. The blocker is brilliant, the batter is meh in single-player, and exploder flinging is very hard to design with. Even in Lix, I'm sure I could do better with today's understanding.
NL doesn't have direct inter-lemming-action besides the blocker, it's an unexplored niche. Well, it has the zombie.
Thus, it's a consequence of the lack of extraneous stuff, and the difficulty of inter-lix-action, that in Lix, the terrain modifies the lixes so often.
By contrast, a pure movement skill lets a lemming modify nothing but itself. It bypasses the entire point of indirect control that feels inherent to all these games. This is not as elegant as it could be. On top of that, movement skills quickly get a ton of bugs and special cases.
Thus, especially with only one skill to add, and considering the existing skill mix (more below) in NL, adding one movement skill, but adding zero environmental-modifying (terrain, lemmings, ...) skills, would feel so strange.
Lemmings is about setting up lemmings to alter terrain from the correct spot as much as it is about altering the terrain itself.
Yes. You can get lemmings into those spots with terrain-changing skills. You can get them into position with movement skills.
I don't see how that is an argument against terrain modifiers. It's an argument for skills to treat different lemmings differently than non-assignees, but most skills satisfy that.
because the worker lemmings creating the path would be Walkers like everyone else. Thus, they couldn't reach any spots that the crowd couldn't reach, which would greatly limit puzzle potential.
Wrong. The terrain-changers all operate at different speeds. You will often separate workers already by this.
And there are
8 7 pure movement:
5 4 permanent (all 5 except disarmer), plus walker, jumper, shimmier. More than enough.
If you want to be diverse, you should really add stuff that isn't about single-lemmings movement, but accomplishes more than that. Doesn't matter what extra it accomplishes. Can be terrain changes, can be direct lemming interaction, ...
If you think the Slider doesn't add a lot of new things: Why would we need any further terrain-modification skills if these already fulfil 95% of required jobs? Simply because "we haven't had one in a while"?
Terrain modifiers add a lot of new things.
The 95% sounds like massive overestimation. Or did the existing terrain modifiers really fulfil 95% of the jobs that came to your mind?
Let's explore the design space deeper.
My propositions of upward Diggers and downward Builders was met by some with the valid question of whether we actually need to be able to modify terrain in every possible way,
Explore the design space deeper than merely changing the angle. You don't even have to be super creative.
Some creativity helps. The angled blaster received positive gut reactions because it adds range to the ever-basic idea of continuous terrain removal. It's not super creative, it's merely the combination of two ideas that were presented us on the silver platter in the very same discussion. But it squarely points us in the right direction of design.
Icho's jet boarder goes in the same direction. This one is even more creative, almost too much, it sounds really wonky on first read. But I enjoyed the reasoning for it, how he tried to address so many different needs and came out with something still tasteful. It even satisfies the niche of the runner, it gets a single lem ahead with speed.
but apparently there were good reasons why movement skills where preferred by the majority.
Majorities and fan bases? This is about design, not popularity:
- People like what they're familiar with, not what is best.
- People are notoriously stubborn to change their opinions, even in light of evidence, as if sticking to opinions were a value.
- People need courage to explore the design space on their own. It's easy to post an existing design because the poster can be sure that several people will like it. By contrast, the poster of a fresh design must expect, at worst, complete rejection of an idea that they spent time on.
Only when a design, really the design alone, convinces the reader by its own strength, then one has an argument.
If however we can agree that pioneer levels will and should always be a major part of Lemmings
This idea that parkour levels are somehow bad in general to me seems to be the latest iteration of "pioneer levels are boring / second-class levels"
I don't see how you conclude that parkour means hero. E.g., you could have three workers, all with different permanents (which happens to be easily possible already in current NL since there are 5 permanents) that all contribute to the route. They might even be tangled by timings, what you seem to dislike (explicitly at least for crowds).
The dislike for parkour must thus have a different reason.
My personal hesitation against pure movement comes from a principle of elegance in game design, it's more elegant (to modify terrain to then modify terrain) than it is (to pure-movement-skill to then modify terrain).
If namida is satisfied with NeoLemmix being less about manipulation via environment and more about parkour, hm. I'll have to sleep over this one some more.
-- Simon