I just want to reassure everyone that this pack has not been forgotten! In fact I've made a burst of progress over the last week, and the pack is now more than one-third complete!


Topaz 8 - Hell or High Water

This level, which I finished today, is one of my favourites so far. You can go for either the left or right exit, but neither is trivial, and there is a 100% talisman that is also possible with either exit! Which way will you choose?

I haven't looked in depth at the list (500 levels is a lot to look through, and I don't know all of the levels anyway) but my first thought is that the project's premise seems rather misguided. Putting together all the levels from every version of Lemmings, arranging them in difficulty order and then recommending new players to play them in order means that the difficulty level stays at "very, very easy" for much too long and players will most likely get bored. A quick glance at your list bears this out -- "Only floaters can survive this" as level 93, really? This is a tutorial level whose entire purpose is to be a first introduction to floaters. If floaters have appeared on any previous level, it should be cut. If you have several different floater tutorial levels, select just one. (And the same with each of the other skills.)

This is more or less what we did with Lemmings Redux. I'm not saying we got it perfectly right, but we looked over all the levels we were considering adding to the easy rank and made sure each one contributed something distinct that justified its place -- e.g. "Snuggle up to a lemming" introduces steel; "Downwardly mobile lemmings" requires you to think about where to dig down to avoid creating a splat distance.

(I'm not saying you should remove a bunch of levels from the engine; having one source from which all levels can be played is a worthy goal. But the main recommended way to play should be more selective.)

Quote from: WillLem on September 28, 2026, 11:09:26 PMHonestly, I think we should just get rid of the "In Development" board. If authors wish to release unfinished work, maybe we could encourage the practice of a [WIP] topic in the regular "Levels" board which subsequently gets deleted when the finished product is ready. This would help to reduce Forum clutter and seems good practice anyway.

Very strong disagree from me too. "In Development" topics are not just a place for authors to post progress updates; they are a place for other users to discuss the in-progress pack, post feedback and replays. Keeping the old topic when a pack is finished and released is useful for the author, and interesting for everyone else. But the old topics need to be kept out of the way so it's easier to find finished packs, and a sub-board is the perfect de-cluttering solution for that.

In the original contest #3 it was randomly selected by the host, from among the people who entered, so everyone who submitted terrain for a level was implicitly marking themselves available for receiving someone else's terrain to complete.

As I said, though, another contest using the same general idea doesn't necessarily have to do exactly the same thing; it's up to the new host to decide on the rules.

Contest 3 had a "tag team" format where each contestant would build the terrain for one level, then levels would be shuffled at random and each contestant would receive terrain built by someone else to turn into a finished level by adding objects and deciding on stats and skillsets.

Of course, a collaborative contest is a broad idea and doesn't need to follow the previous format exactly.

NeoLemmix isn't getting any more skills. Namida has decided to stop further development of the original NL engine, and while WillLem is still developing NL Community Edition, it has to remain physics-compatible with original NL.

You might be interested in looking into SuperLemmix instead; it's a fork of NeoLemmix that already has more features, including the Grenader (not quite a Bazooker, but it is a throwable explosive) and L2's Ballooner. Also, it's still in active development, and as far as I know, is still open to the possibility of more skills being added in the future.

However, please don't get your hopes up for any NeoLemmix or SuperLemmix-like engine that includes all the L2 skills. Coding all 50 skills would be a huge amount of work for very little benefit; the community widely agrees that L2 went overboard and there is simply no need for that many skills.

Quote from: Flopsy on September 05, 2026, 03:16:07 PMThese sets are considered impossible pretty much.

18 - R1 requires 1 hatch, 1 exit, no steel or OWA and no interactable objects but R2 requires you to remake an official level with a new solution but there is probably none if any which satisfy R1. Probably be proved wrong here but I'm willing to bet this is not going to be a fun set regardless.

Original levels with one trapdoor, one exit, no steel, no one-way wall and no other objects (except for water on the bottom, which is allowed in contest 18's rules):

(Levels in parentheses have purely decorative steel; you'd have to ask the contest organiser whether this is okay)
<Levels in angle brackets have a purely decorative interactive object; same applies>

Fun 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, (6), 7, 8, (12), 13, 14, 16, 19, <20>, 22, 25, <26>, <(30)>
Tricky 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, (8), (11), 12, 14, 15, 16, (17), 18, 19, 21, 22, (23), 24, <(25)>, 30
Taxing 3, 10, 11, <(12)>, 14, 15, 20, (23), (24), 25, <(27)>, 29, 30
Mayhem 4, <7>, 11, <13>, 17, (19), 20, 21, 22, <(24)>

I may have missed some or marked some wrongly, but the point stands, there are a lot of eligible levels, and that's just from L1 (contest 18 states that ONML, Genesis, Holiday and other official levels are also eligible). Probably doesn't matter since this is still a hard set to do and it's unlikely anyone will pick it, but I just wanted to make things clear so that people know the possibility is there 

I never got round to announcing this, but since my last post in this thread was about playing Hollow Knight: Silksong, I should mention that I did indeed finish the game. Reached 95% by myself, then got some pointers for the last few things I was missing (just the names of the areas they were in), since combing all over the game world for things that could be anywhere felt like it would be a sour note to end on after such a beautiful game.

There are still achievements to go for -- similar to the first Hollow Knight, there's one for completing it in 5 hours, and there is a "Steel Soul" mode where your save file breaks if you die. Both of these will be much harder to achieve in Silksong as it's both a harder game and a much larger one. So I haven't yet found time to get back to the game to give them a serious try.

Meanwhile, in the last couple of weeks I have rediscovered and played through I Wanna Lockpick, a puzzle game I first tried a couple of years ago. Back then, I got stuck and eventually looked at hints and fell into a spiral of getting spoiled on solutions, and it stopped being fun. But recently, one of my Touhou friends was playing this game on Twitch, and that reminded me of it, and I felt long enough had passed that I could try again, this time without looking at hints at all.

I'm almost at the end now: 64 in-game hours, 207 of 213 puzzles cleared. I'm hoping I can go the rest of the way 

So, what is this game? Well, you take the coloured keys and locks idea from Chip's Challenge... and you make that the entire game. That might sound like it must get boring and repetitive, but it really doesn't, because it gets extremely creative by introducing new types of keys and locks (and I won't say more than that in case anyone wants to look into it themselves -- it really is most fun to go into it blind!) And since you are always manipulating numbers of keys and locks, the puzzles have a strong mathematical flavour that, I think, would appeal to a lot of the people here.

Quote from: WillLem on August 24, 2026, 02:27:44 AMDid I miss something? We're not talking about timed bombers here, we're talking about framestepping. The original point stands: a lot of L1 levels feature challenges related to general timing and crowd control, which are rendered trivial by the ability to framestep.

Right. I mentioned timed bombers specifically because those are the clearest example where the entire level is trivialised. Other than that, I can think of specific activities in levels that become not an issue any more (such as precisely placing a miner so that it outputs where the crowd can climb into the tunnel), but those levels still have puzzle aspects. I guess there are levels like "The Crossroads" that are are entirely an execution challenge, but still a small minority of the levels in the game.

Quote from: WillLem on August 23, 2026, 06:25:19 PMFramestepping, on the other hand, is tantamount to cheating in a game like Lemmings.

There is no such thing as cheating in a single-player game, unless it has some form of player-player interactivity (such as achievements, online leaderboards, etc).

QuoteWe all agree that the ability to framestep backwards immediately renders most of the original levels (which is what many players come to the Forums looking for) obsolete.

Out of 120 levels, there are five timed bomber levels in the entire game. ONML has only two out of 100.

QuoteHm. Maybe I disagree that it doesn't make for a good game. If that's true, why are we all here? The vast majority of original Lemmings ports don't even have a replay system, let alone per-frame control over the gameplay. It can't be that bad a game if there's an entire Forum dedicated to it...

I'm here for the custom levels (making, solving and discussing), the challenges, and the community most of all. I haven't played original Lemmings for years.

Of course, I loved it when I played it as a kid. I loved saving the cute creatures, the music, the graphics... but most of all, the feeling of being challenged to work out how on earth it was possible to solve these levels, and feeling great when I got those moments of insight that made everything fall into place at last.

It's true that the original game didn't have any kind of replay system, whether because it would have been too tricky to code given the limitations of the time, or because it wasn't a common feature in games, or because the developers simply didn't think of it. Still, if it had had replays from the beginning, I can't see that anything I liked about the game would have been changed or diminished.

But I finished the original games decades ago (not counting ones like L2 and L3 that didn't interest me enough to look into them), so the only reason I'm interested in modern clones at all is their ability to support creating and playing new levels.

I know that maybe it's not my place to say these things. I haven't played any Lemmings content for a long time now, and when I do come back to it, it'll be NL for sure. So my opinions shouldn't have much weight in the direction RL takes. I'm mostly contributing because I hope this discussion can help you reason out the decision, so that whatever decision you end up making, it's done for good reasons.

QuoteConversely - when I'm playing in NeoLemmix/Lix, I use backwards framestepping, of course - why wouldn't I. But, it makes the game feel totally different. Specifically: there are no real-time stakes at all. Nothing I do really matters because I can just skip back and redo it immediately. It feels like I'm editing a video clip rather than playing a video game. This is fundamentally a different way to play, and it matters.

This reminds me a lot of things that were said before the decision to add unlimited undo to Deadly Rooms of Death. Specifically, I remember one poster who was vehemently against UU because he wanted moves to feel "consequential". And then UU got added, nothing really changed, and it was still the same game, just easier to play.

It might surprise you, after the things I've said, that I actually don't use UU in DROD myself. But it does have single undo and checkpoints; if the choice were between enabling UU and having to restart the room every time I made a mistake, then I would have enabled it from the moment it was possible to do so 

But anyway. In a game like Lemmings or DROD where levels (or rooms) are distinct units of play, there are no "stakes" in any case. The only possible consequence for failure is loss of time. And that matters a lot more to me now that half of my life is behind me, and so much of my time is lost through feeling exhausted. I want the games I play to respect my time, and if I feel a game doesn't, I'm much more likely to close it and find one that does.

And while I appreciate that you prefer to play without replay features, that in itself isn't an argument for not adding them. If those features are there, people who prefer to play without them can still do so, while if they're not, everyone is forced to play without them regardless of what they prefer.

Quote from: Simon on August 23, 2026, 09:42:29 PMIn DOS Lemmings 1's We All Fall Down, I now believe that digger-digger cancelling isn't possible in a way to produce a permanent staircase. Your 2-digger solution is thus NeoLemmix-only.

Those are not the only two platforms! Digger cancelling is possible on Amiga, Mac, Genesis and SNES (although Genesis doesn't allow RR changes while paused, and I believe that means WAFD requires 3 diggers minimum).

Quote from: WillLem on August 23, 2026, 05:37:36 PMIt's basically a reward system (many games lock features behind progress - this is normal)

Features, yes. Solve the hard level, get the snazzy new costume or ability card or wave gun or whatever.

But not quality-of-life features. If the purpose of adding a feature is to improve quality of life, then it should not be locked.

QuoteThe first Lemminas pack and (particularly) Lemmings Recurring both feature levels which are basically impossible to complete in real-time. I've tried.

That proves that the task is difficult. You wouldn't have attempted it if it were impossible.

QuoteI resolved to only ever create levels that can be solved without even using assign-whilst-paused. [...] If a level requires an assignment on frame X, and another at frame X+n where n is less than about 10, it's too fiddly and annoying.

Right, that's where you have decided your threshold for "too annoying" is, and you have decided that all your levels will be solvable without assign-while-paused.

Are you going to set up a vetting system so that levels by other designers must pass this threshold before they're allowed to be published?

If not, then levels that don't meet your standards will continue to be made, and "I'd rather they didn't get made" isn't a good answer to the question of whether the engine should have better quality-of-life features.

(Sorry if this comes across as aggressive. I'm mostly annoyed at myself for not having expressed my point well enough in my previous post.)

Quote from: WillLem on August 23, 2026, 04:35:28 PM2) Add Rewind, but lock it behind a 'Modern Mode' along with forwards Framestepping [...] A player must complete the level at least once in 'Classic Mode' before the modern controls are unlocked for that level.

This seems like very much a "worst of both worlds". You put yourself to all the trouble of coding the feature and you prevent the player from using it. What's the point?

QuoteAdding the ability to step backwards one frame at a time allows replays to be finely edited (thus inviting all of the UI quirks we're currently wrestling with in NLCE), and - worse - allows for levels which require framestepping shenanigans as part of their solution.

There is, of course, no such thing as a level that requires framestepping shenanigans. Rubix has a Lix level that requires text-editing the replay file, because there is no other possible way of inputting 95 climber assignments in a single frame (unless this has changed in later Lix versions; I haven't been keeping up with developments), but if same-frame assignments are forbidden then anything that can be done with framestepping can be done without.

I'm not trying to be snarky; this is leading into a serious point. I think what you meant was on the lines of: "We don't want levels that are really annoying and fiddly to play without framestepping." And I approve of that thought. But there is no system in place that stops people creating such levels. People did create such levels, back in the Cheapo/CustLemm days before any engines had framestepping. And people came up with challenges on the original levels that required incredible precision. Besides, what counts as "too annoying and fiddly" is hugely subjective.

QuoteI can think of 2 possibilities

What happened to the checkpoint and jump-to-previous-skill possibilities mentioned in the first post? Unless those have been taken off the table for some reason, we have at least four possibilities (five if we count the "add nothing" option).

I don't play RL so I'm not going to vote for my preferences, but I'd like to suggest one more option: instead of time-based checkpoints, add a savestate key so that if a level is 8 or 9 minutes long, you don't have to go all the way back to the beginning for every mistake. Restart + fast forward achieves a similar thing but is a more annoying way of doing it; as Flopsy mentioned, it's easy to FF past the point you wanted and have to start again.

The colours in the latest post look fine to me. Green for the title and save requirement -- green is kind of the default colour for Lemmings, and it helps the important lines stand out. Yellow for time limit is good, as that catches the eye, and you want to be warned when there is a time limit. For the buttons, maybe green for the mouseover colour?

I like the austere appearance when the optional lines are not present. It shows that we're not bogging the player down in a ton of information; here's what you need to know, now start playing.

Might be better to just move the pack to the SuperLemmix board, since having radiation means it was intended to be played in SLX. Or are the pieces merely decorative?