I know what my shortcomings are and I do consider myself to be a novice compared to you guys.
Well, I think in some sense we're all novices especially when it comes to L2 levelmaking, given the lack of decent editors until recently. Your levels aren't all that bad, they might not be all very hard or cunning, but they have potential and are always visually interesting at least.
In any event, my brief experience with L2 levelmaking shows that it really helps to get familiar with what sorts of terrain and objects are available in each style, in order to understand the kinds of things you can make easily or hard to do in each style. And the only way to get familiar is to make more levels in different styles, so experimental is fine.
I actually meant to suggest that perhaps we could start off a genuine thread for custom L2 levels instead of stringing this one out; its title "Here I Go Again" doesn't really indicate what it's currently about, and a new thread would be easier to find for anyone out there who wants to know... I almost started a thread myself but I wanted to check that it was a good idea first...?
I agree. Actually I was thinking about that too, but Dullstar kinda jumped the gun the wrong way by asking Adam to move the entire thread over. I would've asked to split it so that instead of dozens of pages of posts about the then-editor-in-development, the new thread would just have the more recent pages on custom L2 levels.
There aren't too many L2 levels and level designers though, so I think we can handle the "splitting" ourselves by starting a brand new thread, then each level designer simply makes a post attaching all the levels they published so far, and then we continue from there. (Making the level designer do their own post on their own existing levels allow them to update the levels as needed.)
This is doubtlessy the best level made for Lemmings 2 (well, there aren't many L2 levels up to now, but it is also one of the very best if you take original Lemmings 1 into account)!
Wow, thanks!
Yeah, I'm pretty happy myself when all the various ideas I have came together like that. I'm also very happy that at least one person other than myself have now solved the level, I was beginning to worry!
I'm 100% sure that the solution I found is the intended solution, so no point PMing it to you.
From what you've said, and the fact that I haven't come up with any solutions other than my intended and the one backroute for the original version of the level, and no one else has reported anything, I'm pretty confident that you have the intended solution. If not, then at least an alternate solution I'd probably be as happy with as you are. Nonetheless, I'll probably PM you a few questions later tonight to better confirm what your solution is. (That, or you can just PM me whether the "didn't expect this to work" is what I'm thinking, since that's the neat trick I alluded to when I said it's something that's "logical but never been utilized in an L2 level".)
Executing the solution is surprisingly convenient
I guess one good thing about the lack of an advanced playtesting tool for L2 right now is that it forces your solution to be humanly executable.
In other words, it can't be too insane that the level designer himself would've thrown the computer out the window trying to execute the solution himself.
I noticed magno booters not being affected by knock-back bombers (or is that intensional, the boots allowing to stick to the ground?).
It would seem to be intentional, especially given that they don't get knock-back even when they're oriented upright (the only times you can assign other skills to a magno booter).
[And for those still trying to solve my level, no, this fact about magno booters has nothing to do with my intended solution or even the backroute really.]
From your first paragraph, I suppose you also tried this one with other styles first? As the Sports tribe with its blocky simplistic terrain shouldn't make it too difficult to see which tiles fit together (didn't create a level in this style yet though).
Yeah, Sports isn't too bad. Part of the issue is that different styles have very different characteristics of terrain and especially objects, such as the kinds of traps available and the various sizes of steel blocks available. As an extreme example, if I recall correctly, the Circus style not only lacks traps of any kind, I seem to recall it lacks water as well.
In the case of my level, I needed some kind of object that's not available in all styles, and the first style I found it was in the Highland tribe. Unfortunately, while the Highland tribe does have some blocky terrain, they annoyingly come in different colors for different orientations, and after trying it out for some time, I just wasn't too happy with things appearance-wise, so I decided to switch to the Sports style knowing that at least the blocky terrains it offers come in one color.
An example of difficulty figuring out how to fit terrain pieces together is when I was trying to use some of the more "natural" terrains in the Highland tribe to decorate the undersides of the blocky terrain construction, and found myself having to go back to existing Highland levels to get a clue on what pieces should go adjacent with what. The lack of copy/paste ability in GP's editor didn't help.
Another example of the need for style-awareness relates to presets that are normally meant for background. I know that some people like ClamSpammer is very vocal about this, so I tried to make sure my terrain usage is consistent with the official game's. As it turned out, there's an inconsistency with Highland, where that preset of the white dog is background in most official L2 levels, except one (I forgot which, I think Highland 8?). I wanted it to be terrain not background, and that combined with other difficulties I alluded to above was what pushed me to try a different style. For Sports, I run into the opposite difficulty, where I would've liked to decorate some parts of my level with background pieces, but looking at the official levels, pretty much none are used as background, forcing me to leave certain portions of the level undecorated.