Taken from WillLem's "Ideas for challenges" topic. The idea is to find the fewest number of skills per level to kill all lemmings instead of saving them. Nuke is obviously disallowed, and so is running out of time.

Lemmings Redux

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|Rating | 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 |
|-------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|Gentle | 2  0  0  *  1  2  6  2  1  1  1  0  1  0  0  0  1  0  1  0  0  0  0  0  1  1  0  0  1  0  1  0 |
|Quirky | 4  0  1  0  1  1  1  2  7  0  0  1  0  1  0  0  1  2  2  0  0  2  1  0  1  0  0  0  1  1  0  2 |
|Zany   | 1  1  0  8  0  3  1  2  0  0  0  0  1  0  2  1  0  0  1  1  0  0  1  0  0  0  0  0  4  0  0  0 |
|Manic  | 1  0  1  0  *  1  0  1  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  1  0  1  1  0  0  1  0  2  0  1  0  0  0  0 |
|Lunatic| 0  0  0  2  0  3  1  1  1  2  0  0  0  2  1  0  0  0  0  0  1  0  0  0  0  0  0  1  0  1  3  1 |
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* On this level it is impossible to kill all lemmings.

Speedrunning the Lemmings games has been getting quite a bit of attention on the forum and Discord lately, but I don't think we have a topic for speedrunning in general, so this feels like a good time to start one! So... who else here has experience of speedrunning other games? Anyone have any achievements or anecdotes to share?

I know we have at least one speedrunner in our community: Simon is (at the time of writing) the world record holder for Jazz Jackrabbit, and has posted about his experiences in this topic. Of course, trying to go fast is still speedrunning no matter at what level, so please don't feel you have to be a world record holder or contender to participate in this topic!

Some games have time as the sole metric for scoring or competing, so I suppose that my introduction to speedrunning was trying to surpass my personal best times in Minesweeper, which occupied a lot of my free time when I was in college. My best achievement, and my first introduction to the thrill of setting a good time, was an 18 on Intermediate -- my best score on Expert was a much less satisfying 76.

Around the late 2000s, I discovered that my all-time favourite game series, Repton, had been remade for PC, so I bought all three games, completed them within a month, and then started to compete for best scores. In Repton 3, your score has three components: in-game score (diamonds, monsters and crowns); lives bonus (1000 per life remaining after each level); and time bonus (900 minus time taken in seconds). However, if you complete a full scenario (8 levels) in one sitting, then the in-game score will always be the same, since all its components are required for completing the levels at all; lives bonus will always total 24000 for a deathless run; so the difference in two scores will always equal the difference in times. In other words, Repton 3 scoring is speedrunning, just without an explicit statement of time in minutes and seconds.

When I first started scoring Repton 3, the online high scores were dominated by Chris Paul Andrews, except for the "Prelude" scenario, where Peter Van Ek's score was top. I remember that at the time, I felt Peter's score might be completely impossible to surpass -- the Repton games are entirely grid-based, so there are much more limited options for what you can do to improve a time, and the "Prelude" scenario doesn't have the luck-based elements that some other scenarios have -- for example "Egyptian", where on Level 5 one monster must be killed by fungus, which grows randomly. Still, I persisted with working out better routes, eventually surpassing Peter's score by 36 seconds, and claiming first place on all 32 scenarios, with a total score beating CPA's by just over 10,000 points (almost 3 hours!)

The trouble with Repton 3 scoring/speedrunning was that I never really had any competition. My friend Jonathan also did runs (and beat CPA's time on "Oceans" before I did, so he briefly held a world record), and Matthew Thompson was a spirited competitor, but neither was a serious threat. It's now over ten years since I improved any of those scores, and all my records are still standing. I have half a feeling that I'd like to submit the Repton series to speedrun.com so that I can motivate myself to play them again, but without the factor of competing with others, I'm worried that it would feel like drudgery and I'd lose interest quite quickly.

Recently, I've gotten a bit more into speedrunning through Steam achievements. Both Legend of Grimrock games have an achievement for completing the first level under a set time -- LOG 1 gives you four minutes, which is very tight; LOG 2 gives you six, when four would be about the same difficulty as it was in the first game.

But by far the game I've spent most time on is Hollow Knight. Again, my interest was kicked off by Steam achievements: there is one for beating the game in 10 hours, one for 5 hours, and one for 20 hours with 100% completion. The first and third of these are trivial to achieve on a second playthrough when you know where everything is; the 5-hour achievement is the interesting one. That may sound odd, considering the world record is a mere 33 minutes. But Hollow Knight is a metroidvania, with upgrades all over its map. The WR achieves this time by skipping everything that can be skipped -- which makes the boss fights extremely hard. In order to make the 5-hour achievement doable, I had to plan out which upgrades I would get, and what order I would get them in so that every boss in the run would be within my ability with the upgrades I had available. This was a very puzzle-like challenge, which I enjoyed immensely. I intend, if I am ever able to afford a faster computer that can cope with recording HK, to make a video showing the route I constructed, so I have continued to practise on the same route, and got my time down to 2:49. I believe that with my current skill level, I could get my time down even further by skipping some of the upgrades, but again, I don't feel motivated to work on this right now when I am unable to record my progress. I have also done a 100% run in 6:54, which is far above a good leaderboard time, but serves as a starting-point for bringing my time down.

Well, that's my wall of text Anyone else want to take a turn?

I'm putting in quite a bit of work making terrain pieces for my styles resizable, but it does occur to me that other people using these styles may not use this feature to its fullest, just because there's no indication of which pieces are resizable. It should be relatively simple to add this: arrow icons in the top-right of each piece's window, <-> for horizontal and the flip of that for vertical.

When I use the editor's test mode, the NL window opens at varying coordinates, instead of the ones saved in the "settings" file. I'm not sure what exactly determines the coordinates it uses, but just now I had a session where I tested several levels, and the window position was different each time.

I have also observed the NL player itself opening at the wrong coordinates, but this may just be a result of the editor saving the wrong coordinates to "settings".

I've spent a long time today thinking about the algorithm for calculating which postview message to display, and whether I could get the results I want with the current algorithm, simply by reordering the messages in the postview.nxmi, maybe even with duplication of some messages.

And, as far as I can see, it's impossible -- hence the request for an engine change.

The big problem is the "You got pretty close that time" message, which original Lemmings displays when you are within 5% of the requirement. But NL works on absolute counts rather than percentages, and it's become conventional for levels to have smaller lemming counts than the old "default" of 80 or 100 (and in particular, Redux reduces lemming counts to 50 or below except for a handful of levels that required leaving it unchanged). Because of this, the NL default is to display this message when the player is 2 to 5 lemmings short of the requirement.

I'm fine with this change in most cases, but it means that on a level like Speed Trap (15 lemmings, 15 required) you get the "pretty close" message even when you saved 10, which is not close at all.

I should note that this is a small nitpick, and I'm okay with it if the outcome is "no change". In that case I will replace Redux's postview.nxmi with the default one and just accept that there are oddities on levels with a small number of lemmings.

However, just in case, I would like to put forward the suggestion that conditions in the postview.nxmi can be boolean: for instance, "CONDITION -20% AND -5" would mean this message displays if N (the number saved) is at least R - 5 (R is the requirement) and N is at least 80% of R (and, of course, if the player doesn't meet the requirements for a higher message that would override this one).

As some of you already know or have guessed, I am in the process of rebooting GemLems, the pack I was working on last year.


Amethyst 12 - Big Bad John

GemLems was originally going to be a pack using just the classic 8 skills, but then the shimmier and jumper came out, and I got excited and wanted to play around with them so I started a separate pack, RockLems. It got to be a bit too much for me, and progress on both packs ground to a halt.

So I've decided to start over, combining the two packs into one -- but even the first rank will have some brand-new levels. As before, there will be four ranks: Amethyst, Topaz, Sapphire and Diamond (in ascending order of hardness); I'm aiming for 30 levels in each.

All levels will be exactly 800 x 160 -- some don't use all that space, so I get to indulge my love of decorative terrain Most will use the original (including ONML) styles, but similarly to how the original game had one special graphics level per rank, I will be playing a little with other styles, including the Green Hill style I made over the weekend.

This topic is just for me to post about my progress, and maybe show off some individual levels -- I am not going to post a demo or partial release, so you'll just have to sit tight until the pack is ready to go!

When clicking on a talisman with a save requirement, the popup displays the requirement in the form "Save XX / YY" where YY is the total number of lemmings + neutrals + zombies on the level.

Zombies should not be included, because they are hostile entities and saving them isn't part of the goal.