You're welcome!

Even if you re-solve these design problems, it will be worthwhile to see your solutions. You have different constraints than the existing games. And you may well find a solution that blows everything out of the water, and we should all copy it.

For example: Lix and NeoLemmix have savestating frameworks for fast rewinding. That's for manual rewinding to undo a mistake, or for history editing, or to allow the multiplayer mode to react to delayed packets. Maybe you'll decide upfront that you don't need savestating. Your design choices for error prevention must now make sense in a world that can only ever go forward. Compared to Lix/NeoLemmix, this will be a new design restriction. Looking forward to your solutions!

-- Simon

I'll come back to the smileys this Monday, May 25th.

-- Simon

Welcome to the forums!

Random assortment of observations, feel free to drill into whatever interests you.

Instinctively, I clicked on the digger icon in the panel. This click has no effect. Then I remembered how Lemmings's skill-then-lemming (= skill-first) deviates from many games' object-then-operation (lemming-first). The next attempt was to click on one of the blue walking fizzles and see if that selects, and yes, it selects and offers the only existing skill. I understood that it was lemming-then-skill.

Clones (clonesgame.com, played with mouse and keyboard) has lemming-first, too. For its slower singleplayer puzzles, it's a matter of taste whether you prefer lemming-then-skill or skill-then-lemming. For real-time multiplayer, geoo and I recommended the Clones devs to implement skill-first in 2011 as an alternative. For the record: The strongest Clones player, rt, plays multiplayer with the originally implemented lemming-first.

By 2011, geoo and I had already played Lix multiplayer for a few years. Lix offers only skill-first. I have never gotten a bug report for Lix that wished for lemming-first. Lix has dexterity-free singleplayer (unlimited rewind, inserting skills into history, ..., effectively TAS) and real-time multiplayer. In multiplayer, it's more important to mine rightward immediately with some lemming than it is to mine with a given lemming that might even turn leftward before we finish assigning miner. In practice: We begin moving the mouse toward the assignee, we press the miner keyboard hotkey, we start holding the filter-right hotkey, and by now the mouse cursor has arrived on the (single, or bunch of several) lix and we click.

Neon Arcade (only multiplayer) has skill-first.

On mobile, you don't have the luxury of mouse and keyboard. Maybe lemming-first is optimal on mobile? I can't tell. At best, I can dig deeper into the design history of the real-time modes of Lix and Clones.

---

Fizzles's overall pace feels fast. This is fine as long as you remember it during level design. Even easy tasks carry unremovable execution cost. Playtest with people who haven't played multiplayer in Lemmings 1, Lix, Clones. See what kinds of mistakes people make on more complex levels at this pace. If you see, e.g., playtesters assigning too late and bashing into the wrong direction, consider other fixes than heavy-duty input tools: Should you remember every basher assignment until the assignee is in front of a wall? Should lemmings stop for a split-second before turning at a wall? Before falling off a cliff? Before walking onward after landing?

It's also a design choice. Do you want execution difficulty and puzzle difficulty? Or do you want only puzzle difficulty? What kind of pause feature are you going to offer?

The digger tunnel is hard to see against the earth.

Fallers maintain some horizontal speed. This is interesting. Lemmings 2 had it for runners, but it's novel to have it for every faller. You can even design levels around this. On your only level, I managed to kill some lemmings by digging as far left as possible. Some fell leftward past the pole and walked into the abbyss.

The name Fizzles has odd connotation: If it fizzles, there won't be Fizzles.

-- Simon

File upload for smileys via forum web interface was broken yesterday. No time to investigate now. Guess: File permission crap on the server, but then why, it worked 3 weeks ago, we didn't update forum software. Workaround was: I copied some of the images manually to the webserver, replacing old smileys of exact same names.

Alternative: There is setting to allow global mods to upload images. Admins can activate that. Haven't activated it now, seemed too risky. Reason 1: I'll be unavailable for troubleshooting. Reason 2: File upload was broken yesterday for me anyway. Ask namida or wait until I have time.

-- Simon

I uploaded one (the Santa hat), then investigated whether I could save time and mass-replace files at the backend, didn't safely conclude if I could. Then every weekend was busy, and I had no time for the tedious manual work in a single session.

Sorry, I should return to this. I promised to do it and didn't do it yet. Lana poured a lot of work into these.

I will upload a few tonight.

-- Simon

Welcome to the forums!

We've had the fair share of PSP Lemmings fans: Luis, and probably others that I'm forgetting. Fans ported the PSP styles into NeoLemmix.

PS2 Lemmings with the Eye Toy camera looks like some high-up manager at Sony had the obvious idea. I don't remember die-hard fans on the forums for it. PS3 Lemmings flew under my radar entirely. Had you told me about Lemmings on the Playstation, I would have assumed PS2.

Custom Lemmings-1-like engines for Windows appeared, with level editors and communities. Cheapo was the first in 2003, then Lemmini and Lemmix, then Lix in 2009, then NeoLemmix in 2012. I was busy in this scene instead, and I have never owned a Sony console.

-- Simon

You've released CE 1.1 with this in time for Level of the Year 2025, thanks! This June 2026, I'll solve on livestream with CE 1.1 and will report here.

-- Simon

Nerd is a surprisingly good solution to the dilemma about the size of the glasses. The pointing finger makes obvious what it is.

I like all of these! Wonderful job!

I'll begin this weekend to replace existing smileys with Lana's smileys.

-- Simon

I voted for no repeats at all. Not every pack needs beginner fare.

But Proxima knows that I don't like repeats in general, and I'm not necessarily the target audience here. Count vote as you wish.

I like how you're not re-packaging levels that already are in standalone author packs.

-- Simon

I wish all of you good luck. It takes coordination and compromise.

Consider long-term maintainership, i.e., longer than 10 years. Is a proof replay enough for coverage/documentation? E.g., Proxima has many anything-goes levels in the Lix lemforum pack, and Proxima judged my player solutions fine even when they varied from his proof replay in fundamental ways. Such mismatch would have been judged a backroute in other levels.

This is a general worry about long-term changes of level maintainership. It's not particular to this collaboration.

-- Simon

In 2018, I filed against Lix #334 Networked Singleplayer a.k.a. girlfriend mode and it's still unimplemented.

The idea is to solve vanilla singleplayer levels together. Transmit all pauses/rewinds/steps/... over the network, in addition to how Lix already transmits skill assignments. Transmit mouse location, or at least the air clicks. You can voicechat "I want to build from here", then move the mouse, "to here". When it supports several players pausing/rewinding/..., it will trivially support one player with spectators.

I think it's the fundamental mode of co-op. All existing singleplayer levels will be instantly available in girlfriend mode.

-- Simon

I'd like to investigate:

• Air clicking still cuts the global future.
• Assigning still cuts the future of that lix.
• When you hover over a lix without future assignments, still say "Click to insert."
• When you hover over a lix with 7 future assignments, say "Click to replace 7 future assignments."
• You still need the tweaker to cut a single lix's future without assigning anything to her. This is a problem, but the scissors panel button wasn't the answer to it in 2023.
• Opening/closing the tweaker doesn't toggle the mode, unlike Lix 0.10.32, because there will be only a single mode.

I want better visibility/previewability of what your click will do, i.e., from things such as list item #4. Wisdom will be found in better visibility of system status, not in modes.

I don't know whether I should keep two modes or if it's possible to condense cut mode and insert mode into one.

The ideas come from NL: Erase future of same lemming in insert mode.

I'll have to user-test with newbies when all is said and done. It's possible that a single global timeline is easier to understand than many interwoven timelines ... even though I find the single global timeline unnatural. Wonder how newbies will react to either philosophy.

-- Simon

This is still open.

Watching replays is different from rewinding to fix mistakes. You rarely want to interrupt. But you should still be able to interrupt.

-- Simon

Task: Design 1)+2) Yes in a way that prevents my above post's worry of 50-lemming lottery.

Idea: In insert mode, whenever you hover over a lemming, show the number of future assignments that will be cut if we click. You'll know it even in a dense pack, and even without looking at any replay listing. I'll see when I find the time to implement this in Lix.

-- Simon

I'll steelman a case for the restrictive behavior 2) No, and weakly 1) No:

You have 50 lemmings in a dense pack. The replay contains a future builder assignment for one of them, followed by a largely-completed 10-skill route (he's a main worker). Now you want to bash with one of the 50 lemmings in the dense pack. You click into the middle of the pack. If you're unlucky and bash with the soon-to-be builder, you lose the builder's future, i.e., you cut the 10-skill route from the replay.

In Lix, this risk is reduced because Lix (under default options) is in insert mode whenever the tweaker is open. In the tweaker, you see the hovered lix's future assignments highlit. You'll think twice before you click. NL doesn't have this default behavior and indeed warrants separate risk-vs-annoyance balance.

Ideal would be: 1)-2) Yes, and some previewing power into the replay/click, and an undo stack for changes to the replay. Such undo is expensive to implement. Will and I consider undo out of scope of this issue here.

Please participate in WillLem's call for feedback (in the post before this)!

-- Simon