Yeah, sorry, I meant the size relative to the screen (obviously their absolute dimensions can be anything you want).
Re scoring (wall of text coming up - skip to the summary if you're too lazy to read):
I had an idea that instead of basing your score for a level on a single playthrough (and therefore having to weigh up lemmings vs skills vs time, which proved to be near impossible), you could have separate records for lemmings saved, skills remaining, and time remaining, and combine these to give you a score for the level. This would make things simpler for the player (since they don't have to work out what's more valuable on each level), and encourage them to play the levels again and look for different solutions. The "lemmings > skills > time" system makes speedrun-type solutions practically worthless, and I think such solutions should be encouraged even if they save fewer lemmings or use more skills.
Something else that I disagree with, which you just mentioned and which was discussed at length in the linked thread, is the idea of a "max %" score on each level, on which part of the score is based. We still can't be 100% sure what the max % scores are for the original levels - it's possible that someone could find a new bug in the game that lets you save an extra lemming in one level, or something similar. Now, a new game built from scratch is gonna have its own list of bugs and exploits, some of which won't be picked up before release, and so when someone later discovers a new trick, your so-called "max" won't be a max any more. Instead, I suggest we start with the minimum requirement and give bonus points for lemmings saved beyond that.
But wait, won't this inflate the scores for the Fun and Tricky levels where you could sometimes save 50 or 60 more than needed? Not necessarily - you could scale the bonus points based on the difficulty rating of the level. An extra lemming saved in Mayhem is worth much, much more than an extra saved in Fun, and the score should reflect this.
What about the ridiculous amounts of surplus skills and time that some levels had? *cough* Tricky 4 *cough* Well, since we'll be making the levels, we can avoid this problem altogether - I'd suggest that any such levels that we make should go into the easiest rating. If we were to create a system for the original game where you get bonus points for skills and time, we'd have little choice but to make these bonuses zero for Fun and Tricky - anything else would be ludicrous. What we end up with here will depend on how far overboard you want to go with skill/time availability on the easier levels.
In addition to all this, there could be a bonus "challenge" on each level, in the same vein as the ones in the challenge threads on this forum (as well as the old one - you can find a link to that at the start of my challenge thread (see sig) if you're interested). These would require solutions that wouldn't set a %/skills/time record, but are difficult nonetheless, eg. "builders only" or "no builders".
SUMMARYSo, my proposed system would work something like this. I won't put numerical values on it now because we don't have any levels to base it on yet (though I'll have a go at scoring the original levels if you like :undecided:).
- All components of the score for each level would scale with the difficulty rating, with separate scales for each component (you could easily draw up a table for this).
- The majority of your score would be based on passing levels and progressing through the game.
- For each level you have three records (lemmings, skills, time), and you break these records individually - NOT all in one playthrough with one solution.
- Over the whole game, these three categories have a roughly equal amount of bonus points available (or perhaps more for lemmings saved).
- Each level has a challenge (maybe the challenge goals could be revealed after a difficulty rating is cleared) which gives you extra points.
- Instead of using division and other more complicated mathematical functions to calculate the score (these plagued the other thread, and also crept into your post), you end up with a formula based purely on addition and multiplication, so you can display a nice little animation on the level completion screen that shows the score calculation, and the player can follow this easily.
- You get a large bonus (perhaps half of the total of the "level completion" bonuses) for completing a difficulty rating. Keep in mind that you could use Revolution-style level unlocking, and (for example) unlock some Mayhem levels before you complete (or even fully unlock) the Taxing ones.
With all this considered, you should be able to compare players based on:
- their records within a level
- their overall score for each level
- their total score for each rating, and
- their total score for the whole game.
So, to get the highest score, you have to be a well-rounded player, and an expert at ALL parts of the game.
Please tell me if you disagree with any of this, or if you have any ideas on how to improve it.
