Just a quick update on Neon Swarm, (my take on a lemmings clone), which I'm developing as a hobby project together with some other games as part of Lockstep Arcade.
The main improvements are setup for tutorial and single player 'campaigns', and I've also worked on improving the tutorial, and trying to make this generally more accessible.
Based on watching people play, and talking to players, Neon Swarm has actually felt like the hardest sell out of all the games in the arcade. People find this complicated and find it difficult to understand what is actually going on. Unlike some other games in the arcade, Neon Swarm is also not playable on a phone, which is then another thing that makes people less likely to play this.
I noticed that quite a few people, when starting the tutorial, just don't get the way the UI works, with clicking on a button to chose an order, and then clicking on a swarmer (lemming) to give them that order.
I made some mouse cursor changes, e.g. with a cross hair cursor after selecting the order, to indicate targeting something in the world, and tried to make the instructions clearer, but none of this seemed to help much.
I've now added a tutorial hints system, which highlights the specific UI action you need to do next, for the earlier tutorials (as shown in the following video), so let's see if this helps.
More generally, I personally *like* a kind of minimalist approach to Lemmings, and so Neon Swarm just shows small coloured rectangles for the swarmers, as opposed to proper animated characters, but I think, on reflection, that most other people probably don't share this preference, and the animations and character of the lemmings in the original are probably very important in making this interesting to a lot of people.
For Lockstep Arcade, in general, I've found that it's easier to get people to try the single player versions of games, and so there's been a lot of focus on single player tutorials and campaigns, but I don't think this is really the most promising or interesting part of Neon Swarm.
Here's a video of a single player game on the Cauldrons map:
The arcade is playable in a web browser, here:
https://locksteparcade.com/Client (https://locksteparcade.com/Client)
I'm really interested in any thoughts/ideas/suggestions from people on here..