Alright, difficulty description changed! Thanks for your input, guys!

I'm glad to hear you consider LWT Medium difficulty, since that's precisely what it was designed to be: A "filler" and intermediate step for the gap between beginner and expert content. Now we have more packs in this difficulty range, of course, but at the time of its creation, LWT was one of the few.

QuoteYes, you read right Strato, 1 year.

Wow. I guess IchoTolot has made the Holy Grail of level packs then! I remember some user (who was comparatively new at that time, I think?) uttering his ambitions to create a pack that even our most skilled solvers would take one year to solve. And the other forum members replied along the lines of "good luck, IchoTolot, Nepster, and namida are pretty good at this game" . But of course, that didn't include the possibility of IchoTolot himself making a pack that took other users one year or more to solve...


But for the moment, I'm just happy to see how many people have already downloaded the pack within just a couple of hours . Looks like building the anticipation for two years really paid off!

So thanks a lot and good luck to all who are playing at the moment! Feel free to post your replays, no matter how far you get.

Thanks, IchoTolot!

The difficulty descriptions in the title, as kaywhyn correctly identified, are taken from WillLem's suggestions for difficulty ratings. I used them because he proposed them as a unified terminology for the entire forum.

Therefore, if there are some other, more established terms to describe pack-difficulty ranges, I'll be happy to change them!

But currently it still seems to me as if everyone chooses whatever descriptions they want. You might remember, a while ago I asked what "Sunsoft difficulty" means, because some people were still describing the difficulty of their ranks in terms of Fun through Mayhem and then up to Sunsoft. When in reality, most custom packs are far more difficult than original Sunsoft, even on the early ranks.

Medium to Hard might be fitting, though it sounds to me like a more limited range. You described Lemmings United as "hard to extreme". I honestly don't know whether this pack goes all the way up to "extreme", i.e. to levels of difficulty that might be on par with some stuff from United. You're probably the best person to judge that.

I would think that "If kaywhyn and Armani struggled with some of these levels, I guess that means yes". But by now I've watched quite a few episodes of kaywhyn's Lemmings Migration LP, and I've understood that even an adept level solver can occasionally get stumped by packs that aren't considered horrendously difficult as a whole.

Thanks a lot for your kind words, kaywhyn!

Actually, it's already my 5th pack (Paralems, Pit Lems, Lemmicks, Lemmings World Tour, and now Lemmings Open Air).

And yeah, I've already thought about the fact that most likely, this pack won't see a Let's Play. Because you've already tested it extensively, namida doesn't do LPs anymore, as far as I know, and it will most likely be too difficult for Arty and Flopsy (and Flopsy has also taken part in testing). I'm not sure if nin10doadict still does LPs, but as far as I remember, Lemmings World Tour already gave him a more than sufficient challenge .

A couple of the more experienced players used to do somewhat irregular live streams on Twitch in the past (Nessy, Wafflem, Simon and others). They played many of the classics on those (NepsterLems, PimoLems, Quest from Kieran 2...). Usually, these are such adept level solvers that they can beat an entire pack in one or two sessions. So who knows, maybe one of them might be curious enough to try that one day.

The main upside of LPs is that you can judge more easily how difficult a level is in terms of "how long does the player have to think about the solution before finding it?" The successful replay files you get at the end are only the end result, but that only tells you so much about how long it took.

This was especially confusing during testing, because sometimes when there were a lot of leftover skills, that made me think the level was too easy - when in fact that can still mean the player struggled quite a bit before being able to solve the level at all. I'm currently playing SEB Lems once more, and I've been noticing that on several levels there .

But first of all, I'm mainly just curious to see who can beat this pack at all. No matter if "live" or in regular replays.

I definitely have faith in the other people who beat Lemmings United, e.g. joshescue, and of course IchoTolot himself. Nepster also, if he were still around. He implemented the Shimmier, after all, so he must have done quite a bit of testing himself for its mechanics, which is why I'd assume he knows all the tricks you can do with it. (Except that gliding onto a stack from a Reacher is no longer possible since the physics change, which was implemented by namida.) And yeah, of course, namida himself should be able to beat it... but I assume our constant input about the new skills is keeping him more than busy right now ...

You may not be able to go to any real open-air festivals right now. And you're definitely not able to go to indoors concerts. But there is an alternative world where all human beings are 8 pixels large, and neither have to worry about infections... nor about how many of them die for other reasons. And in that world, open-air concerts are as possible as ever.

After two years in the making, the follow-up to Lemmings World Tour is finally here!



You can download both the pack itself as well as the required add-on tileset in the attachments.
Please make sure to download this tileset, strato_generalmd, as well, because it adds some miscellaneous pieces that are required to make a couple of levels work.

The music pack is the same as for Lemmings World Tour. If you don't have it yet, you can get it here!
It features my self-recorded rock / metal versions of the original Lemmings and Oh No! More Lemmings music.
(This does not include ONML track 04, because I hate it , nor the "cross-promotion" tracks of Beast, Menace, and Awesome).



Lemmings Open Air aims to recreate the feeling of playing original Lemmings while at the same time using NeoLemmix skills and features, and sticking to NeoLemmix puzzle philosophy:

- The new skills Shimmier and Jumper are front and centre in this pack.
On the first two ranks, you will only have to deal with the Shimmier. And you might be glad about that, because these levels run the Shimmier through all its gears, and might possibly demand from you every last trick you can pull off with it.
After that, the Jumper gets introduced on rank 3.

- A lot of levels make use of the expanded 10-slots skill panel.

- The tilesets are mainly the ones from original Lemmings and Oh No! More Lemmings, with a few levels in my two new custom tilesets of mine added. These should however blend nicely with the classic ones:

Autumn tileset:

Fallen leaves

Money tileset:

I need a dollar

Normally, there should be no need to re-download these two styles, since they have been part of the official styles download for a while now.


Lemmings Open Air has 120 levels, 30 for each of four ranks:
Soft, Loud, Heavy, and Hardcore

Just like in Lemmings World Tour, all the levels are named after songs.
However, in reference to the famous metal festival that is Wacken Open Air, the tracks are not ordered by how famous the songs are (as it was the case in Lemmings World Tour).
Instead, they increase in order of "heaviness", starting with largely soft pop songs and ballads and ending with the most brutal death metal ever known to Lemkind.

The title "Open Air" was also chosen because, after Lemmings World Tour, this was the first pack I started developing for New Formats - where the ceiling is no longer solid, but "open" and thus deadly. This is also referenced by one of the later levels in the pack, which was however one of the first levels I made for it, called "Forlorn skies".

Because this is a follow-up to Lemmings World Tour, even though stylistically very different, the pack expects you to know all of the tricks that especially the first two ranks of Lemmings World Tour taught you.

Of course, if you already know a lot of tricks and consider yourself an experienced player, feel free to try this even if you haven't played Lemmings World Tour yet - it's quite a huge bite to swallow, after all.
But don't be surprised if this pack hits you out of nowhere with something you might not know yet... ;-)


SOFT
Just the first two levels have all 18 skills that were available at that time (i.e. minus the Jumper) crammed into them. It's the fastest crash-course possible in NeoLemmix. And immediately after that, you're shoved out on stage and have to deliver! The songs on this rank may be fairly easy-going, but that doesn't necessarily mean the levels will be, as well...

Don't worry, be happy

Always look on the bright side of life

LOUD
Going into slightly harder territory now. Here you will find the occasional punk / rock band, and for the ballads on this rank, they're usually already power ballads, with a little more "oomph" to them. Be prepared to use the Shimmier in all kinds of non-obvious ways!

Born to be wild

November rain

HEAVY
The Jumper gets introduced on level 2. Be prepared to have it interact with the Shimmier right from the start! After all, whether the songs are glam rock or classic old-school heavy metal, we want to see all those lemming hands up in the air!

I believe in a thing called Lems

Poison

HARDCORE
These puzzles will wrench your mind as much as their titles will wrench your guts . The song titles will become less and less known as I've dredged them from the darkest depths of the Hell dimension. It's pretty much all Death- or Black Metal at this point. The final level is named after an absolute classic of the genre.

Chopped in half

Symphony of destruction


In stark contrast to Lemmings World Tour, the levels in this pack are largely abstract shapes, not specific locations or "realistic-looking" objects. The focus is on the mechanical challenge first, aesthetics come second. If the levels are pretty, that will usually just mean a nice mix of colours.

However, I've put my two very artistic Christmas levels in here (that don't actually make a lot of use of the Christmas tileset). So it feels just fitting to release this pack at the end of November.

Also, there are a few levels which were hard to completely backroute-fix despite extensive testing.
Interestingly enough, though, one level that is known to have backroutes available still managed to stump one of my testers.
Thus, when even the "unfixable" backroutes are hard to find, you know you've got a difficult pack on your hands!

Many thanks to Armani, kaywhyn, and Flopsy for pre-release testing, as well as nin10doadict (and again Armani) for early testing!
Also thanks to Nepster for introducing the Shimmier, to namida for introducing the Jumper, and obviously to both of them for creating and maintaining New-Formats NeoLemmix.


And with that, I declare this festival open!

Being able to re-arrange them yourself as a user would of course be the bee's knees, but if it were just possible to make them appear in the same order as in the text file, without having to mess with the indices every time new graphic sets are added, that would already enough for me. After all, that technically still gives the user the power to re-arrange the tilesets him- or herself. It's just slightly less convenient than being able to do it via the editor.

Well, I wouldn't really measure level quality in efficacy . It's a matter of personal taste. We as a community have just become pretty good at eventually convincing most new members of our position.

So I agree with you that yes, if we were to get a huge influx of new players all at once, that might tip the "democratic" opinion on what makes a fun level...
...which us, the established player base, would probably consider the "ignorance of the common plebs" .



@namida: Fair enough. As I said, if the distance at which the second Laserer is assigned matters because of range, then I could imagine quite a few cases where this would be relevant. But with the current long range of the Laserer (which I don't mind, btw!), there probably wouldn't be a lot of cases where a close-up Laserer can reach terrain that the first one couldn't reach from further away. And in those cases, the difference between Walker --> Laserer, Cloner --> Laserer, and Laserer --> Cloner should be negligible.

QuoteThere was a gimmick at one point that made the permanent skills one-shot; ie: after one transition to the state the skill provides, the lemming would then lose the skill. (You could of course assign it again, if you had any more copies of it.) It was definitely among the ones with higher potential to create good puzzles.

Indeed; it basically turned Swimmers into Kayakers, Gliders into Icarus Wings, and Climbers into pseudo-Jumpers. ^^ And this type of restriction of only getting past certain obstacles once, instead of "skill assigned once, now that lemming is good for the rest of the level", is precisely one of those limitations that make it easier to build puzzles around. Suddenly, other permanent skills feel similarly broken as the Disarmer, who gets past all traps instead of just past the first trap he encounters.

QuoteAlthough this isn't just a popularity contest as the general potential can be different from the popularity.

That may be technically true - theoretically, a lot of people could enjoy something that would enable e.g. bad puzzle design - but in practice, I'd say those two things go hand in hand:

1) If a skill is popular, a lot of people will use it, therefore lots of level ideas will be created. That's already loads of potential by itself, but you're pretty much also guaranteed to get quite a lot of decent puzzles out of this if so many different minds throw their hats in the ring.
2) If there were really something we would consider "bad for the game but popular"... well, wouldn't that just mean that the community consensus on what makes good level design shifts?

Just like we see it happening now already: Initially, this whole idea came from the shared feeling "19 is a weird number, let's wrap NeoLemmix up with one 20th skill".
The somewhat unspoken consensus also seemed to be "NeoLemmix is already complex enough, let's not overdo it with too many skills."

Now there are more voices than I would ever  have expected on team "4 more skills!" (insert Trump joke here). As if this experimental version had brought out the inner Lemmings 2: The Tribes player in all of us.


One more thing I realised about the Laserer:

Spoiler

It's not just that you can cross them - you can obviously also clone them. This is another issue with the Fencer: Clone him inside his own tunnel and the clone is cancelled immediately.

With a Laserer, obviously you would have to have him carve out a tunnel first, then once he is inside that tunnel, assign a second Laserer and clone that one.

Still a little bit of a hassle, because that second un-cloned Laserer would be pretty much useless, since it shoots along the exact same path the first one has created, so it most likely wouldn't remove any further terrain - except for its range, of course, now that the Laserer is inside his own tunnel, i.e. further away from the point where he fired the first shot.

However, cloning a Laserer inside his own tunnel is still way less complicated - just one additional skill assignment - then getting a Fencer clone to patch up the patch behind the original Fencer by using a Platformer first, and at such a position that he doesn't leave a gap between platform and tunnel ceiling, so that he can then walk up right to the wall and start fencing, which still requires a second assignment of the Fencer anyway (meaning, cloning a Fencer actually never leads him to fence directly).

QuoteMake a styles.ini file that fits this and, assuming no strong objections (or possibly even in spite of them, if there's enough support), I'll put it in the next update.

Alright, just cutting and pasting the tilesets in that file is easy enough... but as far as I understand it, I also need to change the numbers for "order" for each tileset.

Is there any more efficient way to do this? I just want to ask before I change every single number by hand.

Especially because such an alphabetical list would have to be updated whenever new tilesets come out. Simply adding new lines between existing ones would be straightforward, but if the order index is required in addition to that, such a manual changing of the order numbers would have to be done every time a new tileset comes out.

So, now that I have made my own post in the Feedback thread, I have read the other ones.

Apparently, and as expected, each of the four members who have posted so far has a different least favourite skill (i.e. the one they would cut if they had to cut one).

IchoTolot: favourite Laserer, least favourite Slider
Proxima: favourite Slider, least favourite Laserer
WillLem: favourite Slider, least favourite Spearer
Me: favourite Laserer, least favourite Grenader

So one "cull-if-it-has-to-be" vote for each skill. In other words, no overwhelming dislike for any particular skill.

Sounds to me like more evidence that we should keep all four !

Alright! I have deliberately not read any of the previous comments yet, so that I don't feel the need to reply to anything, but can just state my "unbiased" opinions first. As this is ehat I understood namida asks from us here.

Quote from: namida
- What is your favorite trick you've seen / found involving one or more of these new skills? (Use your own judgement as to what constitutes a "trick".) As a courtesy to other members who may want to discover tricks on their own, please spoiler tag this.

Favourite tricks

Sliders falling off their own Builder staircase to turn around, and then potentially continuing to shimmy along the underside of their own Builder staircase!

Also, Sliders can drop into Laserer tunnels from above and immediately start shimming down those Laserer tunnels. This is not possible with Fencer tunnels because they are too narrow to shimmy through.

Note that Laserer tunnels can also cross easily. This is a HUGE upside over Fencers. I've made an entire level around trying to cross two Fencers ("En garde!" from Pit Lems) because it's so hard to do. In case of the Laserer, it's not the lemming himself that removes the terrain, so the ray can cross the part where the other one has already removed terrain.

Freeing Blockers by throwing grenades at the ground under them, or by frying their butts with a Laserer from afar, those things deserve an honorable mention.

Quote
- If all four skills were to make it in, but you were allowed to make exactly one change to how one of them worked (not including bug fixes - assume those will happen regardless), what would your change be, if anything?

Most likely, I wouldn't change anything; I'm perfectly content with the current arcs of the Laserer, Spearer, and Grenader. And regarding the Slider, the only required changes I am aware of are indeed bugs.

However, if I had to offer one thing up for consideration, it would be the size of the Grenader's crater, making it smaller, closer to that of the Bomber. Maybe that would make it less prone to causing backroutes by just nuking away huge chunks of (even one-way) terrain.

I haven't used the "dent the ceiling to stop a Shimmier" application yet, especially since I've now found out that can be done with a single Spearer to the ceiling as well. (Only at least two spears are enough for the Shimmier to land on them; a single spear will be something the Shimmier bumps into so that he falls down.)

Quote
- If you were responsible for picking which skills do or don't make it, and were told you could only pick one skill to make it in, which one would you pick? Why?

Tricky. I'd have to coss a toin between Slider and Laserer. But at this point, if you held a gun to my head, I would probably prioritise the Laserer. I have found ways of simulating some very specific Slider behaviours with Floaters falling through one-way fields. But I haven't found any way yet of emulating a Laserer.

That said, the Slider is still my very strong second, followed by the Spearer. And as said above, my favourite trick(s) involve(s) the Slider. If it weren't for the Laserer having a 45-degree angle and therefore allowing Shimmier interactions as well, the Slider would still be first.

Quote
- If you were (same), and were told you must pick exactly one skill to reject while keeping the others, which one would you reject? Why?

The Grenader. For the following reasons:

- Backroutes featuring the Grenader are hard to prevent because they are like Bomber backroutes, i.e. can ignore one-way arrows, but the crater is much larger. Spearer backroutes are easier to prevent because they are similar to Stoner backroutes (except the Spearer isn't quite as broken). The Grenader however has an upside compared to the Bomber, because it's not only larger, but also not lethal. Thus, the Spearer is a weaker Stoner, but the Grenader is a stronger Bomber. At least when he stands right next to or right below his target, so that the grenade immediately explodes. Of course, you can't abuse the Grenader as a Bomber where there is a lot of space.
I for one like to design around certain limitations. This is why I like the Spearer more than the Grenader right now.

- The Grenader is the only new skill that isn't part of Lemmings 2: The Tribes, so I would be less bothered by losing it compared to any of the others. Sure, comparable to the Bazooker or Mortar, but still quite different flavour-wise.

If one skill had to get cut, I don't know if the Spearer would still have a chance of getting implemented if the Grenader had to go, or if Spearer and Glider would count as one skill that would also get culled together.

But I think this "2 in 1" approach only made sense when it came to programming effort; now, both skills can justify their existence independently of each other, with the only connection being that they should share the throwing arc.



TL;DR: My priority list is 1) Laserer, 2) Slider, 3) Spearer, 4) Grenader. But I want to stress very strongly that I still hope to see all four skills implemented.

And I'd be happy to toy around with the Grenader much more when I can be certain that it will stay. Instead of all my levels featuring it being... well... blown up by its elimination.

Yes, quite a few of them are still at least somewhat of a backroute - and I haven't even had a chance to look at kaywhyn's solutions for the main ranks yet.

I assume there won't be many more backroutes on the first couple of ranks... so if you want to, you can start uploading those. At least I don't remember a lot of backroutes from your replays for the first two ranks, because those had already been played by both Colorful Arty and Flopsy. And whatever I found for those I'm pretty sure I have fixed by now.

But you can expect at least one huge update once I've watched all of kaywhyn's replays.

My collection of your replays also somehow stopped at 12th September - I guess this may have to do with my old laptop having crashed in the meantime, so maybe this was the latest state I had saved somewhere. Anyways, I also re-checked you replays since 17th September, and there are also some things on the Rockstar and Legend rank I can hopefully enforce better. (For example, on "Holy mountains", you could just go beneath that entire temple structure, or on "Blowing in the wind" you could completely ignore the upper exit by simply connecting the crowds. These are the types of backroutes that a few steel walls can fix quickly.)

However, I always implement the changes in Old- and New Formats in one swoop, so that I don't forget any. And right now, I don't want to fix any levels before I've watched kaywhyn's replays (even if they're for Old Formats).

Because I've noticed, some of the fixes I've implemented for kaywhyn's Groupie solutions now already broke some of your solutions for those levels (e.g. Groupie 05). I assume that's because you had found a similar backroute as him, especially with your announcement that you "re-backrouted the levels" . But of course, I can never be sure.

The downside of "watching everything first, then implementing the changes" is of course that with such a large pack, it's still easy to overlook somethings when going back to the level editor. I do watch them in bites, of course, not in one piece, and I do take my notes where necessary... but still, some backroutes can always slip under the radar.

I recently had a strangely awesome idea... and now I've finally gathered up the insanity to implement it. Depending on your point of view, it can be a cool or a nasty surprise.
But either way, a surprise. So I don't want to ruin it for those who prefer to be surprised... but then again, most puzzle fans don't... so I also want to be fair.
And of course I'm also impatient and want to share this, because I don't think anyone else has done this so far.

Although, I vaguely recall WillLem having tried something like this with custom sprite recolourings... I don't know whether he changed it later, though, or whether he "got away with it"...

Anyways, click on the following spoiler tag at your own peril. It contains information about a tutorial level called:

Pitch-black universe (which is a song by the Finnish dark-metal band Before the Dawn)

As outlined in the starting post, this pack is inspired by Lemmings 3D above all else.

Remember how Lemmings 3D had levels on the Practice rank forcing you to use its new features? Like Highlight Lemming and Virtual Lemming?
There were even some levels in the main ranks that placed all cameras inside a restricted area - famously "The Prisoner" - so that you absolutely had to solve them in first person.

Well, with this important context in mind, so that you don't just consider this pointless trolling, I made the ultimate level to enforce / teach a new player to use clear-physics mode:


Pitch-black universe

First of all, thanks a lot to Colorful Arty for enabling this madness!
Clearly, he did his best to prevent such shenanigans by making the default background for his Silhouette tileset (that is, if you don't use the orange one that comes with it) completely white.

Thus, this wasn't as easy as simply hitting "clear background" in the editor, because even if most other tilesets have a default black background, none of them actually include it as a graphic.
And in turn, if I had set the level's main theme to a different one than Silhouette, then the staircases, platforms, stacks etc. and, most of all, the lemmings themselves would have become visible again.

I was about to go out of my way to deliberately add a black background graphic to my strato_generalmd tileset (like everyone's special tileset they use for custom additions).

But then, I discovered this background from one of GigaLem's Freedom Planet sets, which fits the title even better. You do still see something, and indeed you see a universe... and yet, you see nothing. Maybe the hatch, the exit, and the trap, but none of the terrain. Even the reflections of the water in the bottom left corner can just look like additional stars in this screenshot. Of course, once you start the level, you will see the water moving.

Fortunately, Arty's Silhouette tileset doesn't include triggered traps. The one thing I confused for a masher trap turned out to be a teleporter (and I was wondering why it didn't do anything... well, of course, I hadn't placed any receiver in the level, because I didn't want any teleporters in it in the first place). But there is a completely black version of the Marble slasher fire trap, so I used that one instead.

Hidden traps are bad because they can surprise you.
But hidden lemmings and completely hidden terrain - well, that just forces you straight into clear-physics mode, so that no nasty surprises remain.

It's nice that we have so many different graphic sets, but by now it's really getting hard to keep the overview. Not over the standard orig, ONML, and L2 tilesets, which are right at the start (where they should stay, since they are probably the most-frequently-used ones). But when it comes to custom tilesets, the order in the dropdown menu in the editor seems fairly arbitrary.

Yeah, sure, I can understand why namida's Lemmings Plus tilesets are first in the list after the official tilesets - he created and maintains this entire thing, after all, and we all are very thankful for it .

However, even after namida's tilesets, the order doesn't really seem to be alphabetical or anything else: Gronkling comes before Flopsy, then it jumps back to Arty, then Raymanni, then IchoTolot, then the Freedom-Planet tilesets... I often spend a long time just scrolling through this list, even though I know exactly which tileset I want to pick, but I just can't find it quickly.

In addition, each line start's with the name of the tileset, not with that of the author; so sometimes, if the tileset name is long enough that you can't properly see the author, it would be hard to tell the order even if it were alphabetical.

I think it would be in everyone's best interest, for the sake of convenience, if we bring some order into this randomness.

My suggestion would be:
1) Everything from the orig tilesets down to the L3 tilesets remains as it is right now.
2) After that section, the custom tilesets currently start with namida's Lemmings Plus tilesets. I wouldn't necessarily mind them staying there, with the alphabetical order starting after namida. However, especially for those LP tilesets that GigaLem has revamped, most people are probably using those more frequently now. So it doesn't really make sense for the original LP tilesets to take precedent in this regard.
3) Maybe the format shouldn't be "Tileset name (Author)", but "Author: Tileset name"? Since we're reading from left to right, it would be much easier to tell this way where you are in the alphabetical order. But this is just optional.

Whether the naming scheme starts with the author or the tileset name itself:
Just begin the custom-tileset list with authors starting on A, and then continue that all the way down to zanzindorf. In case of Colorful Arty, we / he need(s) to decide whether he should go by his full name (i.e. letter C), or just by "Arty", as it's written in the editor right now (i.e. letter A). Given the limited width of the dropdown menu, shortening it to "Arty" is probably more practical.

An alphabetical order is not a value judgment, after all - it's neutral and purely pragmatical.
This should apply to all tilesets which have been "officially approved", i.e. are part of the official styles download.

After the letter z, we could have all the special tilesets at the bottom, followed by whatever the individual level designer maybe added by him- or herself, but what isn't part of the official download (yet). In my case, all my custom sprite recolourings go there.

QuoteThat's why I am also still sceptical about failure/success jingles, but there they are limited to the end of the level and not there constantly during playing so it isn't really a big deal.

More importantly, they can be disabled, and in fact are now even disabled by default. The player needs to actively turn them on if he or she wants them.

QuoteI have another idea though: We take that silent sound and make it the soundfile for the buttons then anyone missing the Bloopedy Boopedy circus can go ahead and get it while everyone else can still enjoy the silence.

That sounds as genius as it is simple!

I probably should have come up with that idea myself; just today I revisited an online experiment of mine where visual and auditory stimuli are presented in an alternating manner. And because the website I used to host it only has comparatively limited clickable options compared to the free python programming I normally use, I am technically presenting both visual and auditory information each time. But either the visual file is empty, or the sound file is silence, so that only one type of stimulus is presented. Same logic.