5 years ago on February 14th, I decided to record and upload the beginning of a playthrough of Lemmings on SuperLemmini for my second ever Let's Play in honor of the 25th anniversary of Lemmings. Little did I know that that decision would have such a dramatic impact on my life.

A forumer who shall remain nameless (but it was IchoTolot) found my playthrough and invited me to the Lemmings Forums. I decided to check it out and found a bunch of cool people who all loved this classic puzzle game too. This was the first online community I ever was a part of, and it opened so many doors for me, and now I've seen how the internet can truly bring people together.

I want to say to everyone that I've met on here; I'm glad to have joined this forum and met/interacted with all of you! This little decision has made a large difference in my life, and even if I don't spend much time with Lemmings-related things anymore, without this community, it is unlikely I ever would have been involved seriosuly with online communities in general, and it's possible I never would have started streaming. Keep being awesome everyone.

Several years ago, I released my very first levelpack: Reverse Lemmings! I took the original Lemmings levelpack, swapped the entrances and exits, changed the skillsets (and occasionally the time limits and release rate), and made a new pack off of that! I was not allowed to change any terrain or objects other than swapping entrances with exits. Unfortunately, many of the levels kind of sucked and it never got ported to new formats.

Until now.

When porting to new formats, I changed pretty much every single level to have a different solution, so treat this as a completely different levelpack. Even those of you who played the original will find a new challenge with this one! One of the main changes is I'm allowing the new skills to be used, which I didn't do for the original pack.

Fair warning: this pack has virtually no difficultly curve. There will be levels in Fun and Tricky that are harder than some Mayhem levels simply due to the fact that some level really can't be that difficult without the ability to change terrain or objects. That said, I've tried my best to make the earlier ranks easier than the later ones, but my main goal was to make each level have a unique and fun solution. Also, some levels are EXTREMELY difficult. Expect a lot of frustration if you want to beat all levels and get all talismans.

The pack is attached to the post.


dig Just!


lives costs clicking Careless


Edge The On Livin'


Me Save

Y'all. IT'S FINALLY HERE!

...or what I actually finished that is. I originally planned there to be 20 levels in each rank, and there are far less than that, but hopefully what I did finish is enjoyable!

For those who don't know, ArtLems is an art/classical music based pack, where each rank attempts to replicate a different art period with music from said era as well. The pack is going to be a lot harder than my other pack SubLems. Each rank has some pretty tough levels in it (except perhaps the first one), and the ranks don't necessary ascend in terms of difficulty (later ranks may have levels much easier than earlier ranks, so feel free to jump around the pack).

I may end up updating this pack with more levels in the future, since I feel bad most of the ranks only have a single digit amount of levels in them, but we'll wait and see.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy!


Download instructions

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zn65f84t78z3u0r/ArtLems_V1.3.zip?dl=1

Extract the ArtLems V1.3 folder to your levels folder.
Extract the artlems folder to your styles folder.
Extract the ArtLems Music folder to your music folder.


Ancient

The earliest period. This is before traditional art like paintings and drawings were around, but the levels will instead focus on ancient civilizations and their architecture, as well as natural environments untouched by mankind. Since there is no recorded music from back then, I've chosen music reminiscent of the various ancient places you visit. Most of these are tutorial levels, but you'll get a few tricky levels by the end. This rank has 16 levels in it.


Byzantine's Temple of the Lion


Medieval

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Medieval period began. Now we have the means to create paintings and more beautiful structures. Religion is also a large component of the artwork. The levels are designed to either be modeled after Medieval locations or look like simple Medieval artwork. The music features lots of flutes, lutes, and pipes. This rank starts pretty simple, but the last few levels are quite difficult. This rank has 14 levels in it.


Church of Saint Stephen


Renaissance

And now that the Dark Ages are over, we enter the Golden Age of the Renaissance! No longer is the art dreary or bland, but now they are vibrant and full of color! Religious themes are still reflected in the artwork, and the music is more vibrant with a larger selection of instruments. The puzzles here are fairly simple, but elegant at the same time. This rank has a mere 5 levels.


Terramort


Baroque

The Renaissance is over. The Baroque period features more ornate art, with greater detail and emotion. The music has gotten more emotional and deep as well. The puzzles are much more complex than the previous ranks, with many working parts that need to come together. This rank has 6 levels in it.


Playing in the winter


NeoClassical

Now the art has gotten simpler, with strict rules governing how things should look. The music is also a bit more structured, with the piano taking the center stage. The puzzles have gotten trickier still, with some requiring severe thinking to suss out, but they tend to be smaller than the Baroque puzzles. This rank has a mere 4 levels in it.


For Elise


Romantic

Now the art is getting really passionate! Artists are focusing on making their art and music as emotional as possible. The levels are designed to make you feel emotions when you see them. Orchestras are larger than ever before, allowing for loud, complex, and emotional music as well. This rank is the smallest, with only 3 levels in it.


A Night on Lem Mountain


Modernist

The final period. Here I've meshed the remaining art periods after the Romantic period into a single rank. Modern art seeks to experiment with what can be made, regardless of if it looks good or works well. Classical music becomes more atonal to break the rules, and now video game music is used for most levels (to avoid copyright claims on people LPing this). The end of this rank features some of the toughest puzzles I could make. This rank has 10 levels.


Art's Abstraction

Hello friends. I'm not one for making serious, big posts like this, but this is something that has been weighing on my mind, and as one of the main Let's Players who plays Lemmings packs, I want to share my thoughts.

As the title suggests: I believe difficult Lemmings level packs don't make good Let's Plays. Here is why:

Let's Play videos are typically around a half hour in length on average. Some videos are closer to an hour, and some are closer to 15 minutes. Generally videos around a half hour are good, because it's a good amount of content without being overwhelming; I've personally noticed my shorter videos get a lot more views, because most people don't want to spend an hour watching a single video.

This is where we run into problems. Difficult level packs have difficult levels. Difficult levels typically take a while to solve. It may take 30 minutes to solve a single level. It may take an hour to solve a single level. It may take DAYS to solve a single level.

What happens when Let's players play levels that are this difficult? Well, what happens is it takes a long time to record, and a single video will likely only contain a single level. As a Let's player, when this happens (like with Gravity Coaster in SEB Lems), I get very frustrated because I want quality content for my viewers, and when I have to spend a whole video on a single level (especially when said video is over an hour), then I feel that I have not delivered quality content for my viewers. I remember in rtw's DoveLems LP where he spent one video on a single level (The Spring in the Maso ranking) and I did not enjoy that video. It wasn't because the level was bad (it's a pretty awesome level) but I want to see multiple levels in a single video; I don't want to see a whole bunch of failed attempts at a single level. Personally, I think a video of someone playing a Lemmings level should contain their thought process behind solving a level, some different attempts at a solution, followed by the success of solving the level. When you devote whole videos to single levels (or worse, several videos to a single level) this stretches out the Let's Play, and in a level pack that generally has 80 levels MINIMUM this means one can spend months on a single levelpack.

Let's take a REALLY difficult level pack like Lemming United. The levels in this pack are really good, but don't make for an enjoyable Let's Play. Not only is it a ~200 level pack, the levels get brutally difficult pretty quickly (at least for a scrub like me). This would mean a Let's Play would be probably >100 videos, with most videos being long (over an hour), and only covering 1 or 2 levels in a single video. Does that sound enjoyable to you: several months of hour long videos focusing on a single Lemmings level that I end up solving off-screen anyways? Maybe it does to you, but to me and many others, it does not, and when these levels frustrate me because I want to have quality videos, my commentary suffers, as does my view on the levels and pack by extension. This often leads to me giving harsh criticism towards levels (like Gravity Coaster) that I wouldn't give if playing casually. This is no fun for anyone.

Please don't think I'm attacking anyone. I'm not saying this is the pack designers' fault; it's not at all! Difficult level packs can be really fun; but they're meant to be solved on your own time and taken slowly, which isn't possible when recording. When my family and I played the original Lemmings, we spent years on it, often getting stumped on levels for months at a time, and we loved it! We loved taking the time to think and rethink things through, trying different things, and when we eventually solved them, we felt very accomplished and proud! When you spend a long time solving a level on video, you aren't really happy at the end, you're often roaring with relief and foaming at the mouth over how annoying that level was to solve, all because of time pressure and the editing involved with cutting out useless footage (if you do that at all). Difficult levels require time to solve, which is not a grace we are given when Let's Playing the levels. Difficult levels are fun when you can pick them up, put them down, and not have to worry about solving it quickly nor having witty commentary during them. It's a disservice to difficult level packs to play them like a Let's Play, which is why I think Icho's method of recording saved replays of levels on his channel is the right way to go for difficult levelpacks.

I have loved Let's Playing every single level pack I've taken on, but there's a reason I haven't tried LPing Lemmings United, Lemmings Plus V, NepsterLems, or the like; they're too hard for a Let's Play (especially for one of middling intellect like myself ) The level packs I have played have been pretty easy on the whole, with only a small handful of videos being devoted to a single level. If Lemmings Plus I had reached a point where every video was focused on one level with the time taken to solve it being over an hour, it's likely I would have stopped the Let's Play, or continued it out of stubbornness but not enjoyed it at all. At this point, most level packs being released are what I consider too hard to Let's Play, at least by me. And this is one of the reasons I'm announcing that after finishing Lemmings World Tour in the future, it is unlikely I will Let's Play another Lemmings pack. There are many reasons for this, but this is the big one. It's possible I will LP a smaller, easier level pack in the future (such as Proxima or Nessy's future packs), but I'm actually thinking about moving away from Let's Plays entirely in the future; there are many other things I want to do with my precious free time.

Now that I've said my peace, do people agree with this? I know there are people who don't mind >1 hour long videos devoted to just attempts at solving a level, but I disagree greatly. I may be wrong. I may be in the minority. I just wanted to say this and see peoples' thoughts. Let me know your thoughts below!

I want to try doing a co-op or casual race of the Ocarina of Time Randomizer. I figure if people are interested, we select a date, we each get a game with the same seed, and we all play it at the same time. We could either do a casual race, or a friendly cooperation where we each look for the items and let each other know where the key items are.

Let me know if you are interested in this. It wouldn't be for a couple of weeks in all likeliness.

I had an absolute blast playing Ultimate Chicken Horse several weeks ago with Flopsy, mobius, and geoo! I know quite a few people own the game now, so I wonder how many people would be interested in playing some multiplayer this Saturday at 18:00 UTC? Only 4 can play in a server just FYI. I'll record the session and upload videos periodically as I edit them. Just let me know if this is a good time for people; if not, we can schedule it for a different day.

I've had this idea for a while now. I want to make a program for NeoLemmix that essentially finds all possible solutions in a level. You would run this program, input a level file, and it would essentially brute-force its way to find all possible solutions, running in the background so the user can perform other tasks on their computer. When the program finishes, it would save every working replay it found for the level.

For those more experienced with programming and the NeoLemmix code itself, please tell me: would such a program be possible? If so, how feasible would it be to make?

Also, is anyone interested in helping me make such a program? I have a lot of other projects I'm working on right now, so help would be very useful.

I think if we could create such a program, it would be an immense help to the community. Not only would it eliminate the need to get testers for a pack, but it could also help you find amazing solutions to your levels even you never thought of.

Hello everyone. I've mentioned this in passing in IRC, and since the winter semester is starting soon, I figured it would be best to make a topic about this now.

I am making a Lemmings-like game for my final college project!

The name of the game is Tech Mechs! (tentatively) The game follows the adventures of the Tech Mechs: intergalactic explorers who need your help reaching the end of these planetary obstacles! It plays like Lemmings: the Tech Mechs come out of their base and need to reach their rocketship to blast to another planet. They wander around aimlessly, and you give them the tools they need to succeed.

How will this be different from Lemmings?

Although this game will draw many inspirations from Lemmings, there will be many differences.

First, I want it to be more contained than what we currently have. Ideally, I'd like this game to allow for playing packs/levels, creating levels/packs, creating/modifying graphics sets, and sharing your levels all in the same program. I feel like this will give users a much better, more intuitive, and simpler experience than what we have for NeoLemmix. (Lix does a pretty good job on doing this)

Not only that, but I'd also like to incorporate multiplayer into the game. Not competitive multiplayer like Lix, but cooperative multiplayer, allowing for highly complex puzzles requiring multiple people with different skills working together to solve. Each player would have their own Tech Mechs that only they can assign skills to, as well as a different skillset from the other player(s) and a different entrance. All players would share the same exit though. The idea of multiplayer is to encourage people to cooperate and solve puzzles together.

I also think having a level/graphic set database would be really cool, so people could design levels and new graphic sets, post them online, and have other people easily find them, similar to Super Mario Maker. This would negate the need to manually send packs online like we do on the forums, but would also be very complicated!

Finally, a lot of the skills will be different from the ones in Lemmings and Lix. A few skills I feel would have to be brought over from Lemmings, because they are so indispensable.

What will the final product be?

My final project for school will be a beta version of this game. Hopefully, most of the features will be completed in a rather crude manner, and I'd still need to polish it a lot and incorporate new features into it.

When the game is finished, I'd like to sell it on Steam, provided I think it is high-quality enough. The game would ideally attract both the people who grew up with and loved Lemmings, as well as introduce new players to the genre!

Will every level be outer space themed?

Absolutely not. Like Lemmings, this game will have graphic sets. I consider each graphic set to represent a different planet or celestial body. There might be a planet full of huge trees, a planet with red rocks everywhere, or even a planet with giant video game cartridges everywhere! The possibilities are endless, and are no different than Lemmings graphic sets; the ones I create initially may be more space-themed, but that's mostly just to give my game a "theme" for my project evaluators.

What tool/skills will be in the game to assign to Tech Mechs?

I don't have the list finalized by any means, but I'd personally like to incorporate the following skills:

Builder
Yeah, this is one of those skills that really cannot be missing from the game, due to its immense flexibility, power, and overall indispensability in solving puzzles. This will function more or less identically to its Lemmings counterpart.

Driller
Make no mistake, this skill is a basher, with its horizontal terrain destruction, but this one will quickly and smoothly carve its way through walls, more similar to the shoveler in Lix.

Jackhammer
It's the digger, digging straight down until there is no longer terrain under you.

Miner
You know what this does. I may rename it if I can think of a more futuristic thing to accomplish the same task.

Land mine
An interesting take on the bomber. Using this causes the Tech Mech to place a bomb on the ground and continue walking. The bomb blows up a few seconds later taking the nearby terrain with it. This way, it combines the best of both timed and instant bombers!

Caution sign
An alternative to the blocker. This causes a Tech Mech to place a sign right in front of him. Any Tech Mech who reaches the sign will see it says Caution, and will turn around. If you destroy the Terrain under the sign, it will fall down, and Tech Mechs won't be affected by it.

Grappling hook
Like the roper from Lemmings 2, using this allows a Tech Mech to shoot a grappling hook in a direction of your choice, creating a straight line from where they are standing to the first terrain it touches. The game will pause until you select where you want to shoot it, and the range of the grappling hook should be marked by a circle. A much quicker and less tedious alternative to builders.

Laser blaster
Don't get nervous, this tool improves on the Lemmings 2 version by allowing you to shoot it straight up, left, or right. The laser blaster shoots through a single piece of terrain, ending if it breaks though, reaches the border of the level, or hits steel. Like the grappling hook, the game pauses until you choose a direction to shoot. This will allow you to destroy terrain at a distance, and quickly enough that Tech Mechs won't turn around in the tunnel while you're destroying it.

Hover boots
Functions like the floater, slowing a Tech Mech's descent twice as much saving them from fatal falls.

Energy jolt
Using this on a Tech Mech energizes them, making them move and perform skills twice as fast!

Anti-gravity boots
Something I've wanted in Lemmings for a long, long time. This reverses gravity for a Tech Mech, making them walk on the ceilings and perform tasks upside-down, allowing for tons of more puzzle potential! Using another pair of anti-gravity boots brings them back to regular gravity.

Timefreeze
Use this on a Tech Mech to freeze them in timespace. They stop WHATEVER they're doing until you click on them again.

Magnet boots
Lets Tech Mechs walk up walls, but not ceilings. (Anti-gravity boots are for putting Tech Mechs on the ceiling) Skills can be assigned to them while they are walking up walls.


Right now, I don't have all of the programming knowledge to implement all of this, specifically the wireless multiplayer and database for level/graphic set creation. My professor has suggested using a Restful API for making the server for multiplayer or even trying to make a serverless cloud for multiplayer, but I have no clue how to do either of those things. If anyone has worked with those or has alternative suggestions for how to send data across computers on different networks, than please let me know! Also, let me know what you think and if you have questions/suggestions!