@namida
Regarding Delta 2:
I have to ask, was this in some way inspired by Panic Attack from Lemmings Plus II, given similarities in both the name and solution (Panic Attack also heavily relies on diggers to remove thin vertical walls)?
Hmm... That seems to be a fun coincidence! I hadn't seen that level from Lemmings Plus II, but I'll have to have a crack at it now!
Strangely enough, I spent like 15 minutes trying to come up with a title for that level.
In the end I decided on
Panic Room since the lemmings are trapped in an enclosed space and have to move through it quickly with tricky timing issues.
I also solved Delta 1. This feels extremely backroutey, but I can't see any other way to solve it.
Well... that certainly is a backroute if I ever did see one! I've updated the op with V3 of integral lemmings.
That backroute for Delta 1 should now be fixed. I also tweaked Epsilon 2 and 4 again to hopefully fix some backroutes there.
This means that the solutions from IchoTolot and namida for those levels will have to be revisited.
Regarding hidden/obscured traps:
After some consideration I tend to agree that, in general, a trap should be made explicit and obvious as an obstacle.
Looking back at the original lemmings levels there are some really irritating occurrences of hidden traps being placed purely to trip up the player.
For example, the rock trap in
Rendezvous at the Mountain, and that pointless icicle trap near the start of
ICE SPY.
Possibly the worst offender is the icicle trap (again with this thing) in the level
LoTs moRe wHeRe TheY caMe fRom.
That is just an insult to the player, having to deal with the annoying terrain and a random trap placed needlessly.
They usually added nothing anyway, since in those levels you are supposed to simply build over the trap.
By removing that trap (and maybe 1 builder), the level is basically unchanged.
I suppose there are arguments for traps that are concealed to a degree.
The level
Easy when you know how might at first glance seem suspiciously easy to a new player, so they may anticipate something occurring as lemmings walk through that passage.
One could even make the case that the icicle trap in
ICE SPY is foreshadowed by the level title. Although the icicle trap as a whole reeks of poor design decisions.
Further to this, with the advent of such programs as NeoLemmix, the issue of an unforeseen trap can be alleviated using the replay and rewind functionality.
Thus a player doesn't necessarily have to start the level again when their worker lemming dies randomly, they can step back and adjust their approach.
But counter to this yet again, the player may have thought of a specific solution to a level, and the existence of a hidden trap would probably ruin that solution.
This may possibly result in the whole solution being scrapped, leading to frustration since the player has wasted time on something that, in principle, should have worked.
If the trap is made explicit to begin with then this problem goes away completely.
I suppose in the end there are two things to consider:
- If the trap is meant as a true obstacle that the player will have to carefully plan around, make it obvious.
- If the trap is a "simple" trap that could be bypassed with a single builder, remove both it and the builder!
At any rate, I've modified my level Delta 6 to make the traps explicit. I think this actually improves the level visually as well!
PS. Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the four crushers in the level
Easy when you know how aren't aligned with the four pipe columns above?
That never made any sense to me as a kid.
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