@kaywhyn How's this? Quite satisfying to figure out, especially

Oh, also, I'll probably be updating this overtime as I find little annoying mistakes I didn't catch or things I could have done better. Whenever that happens, patch notes will be added/updated in the spreadsheet.

does a plural word count as a separate word from the singular version?

To keep things very, very simple, yes. Any plurals, verb tenses, or anything like that, so long as they are spelled differently (e.g. PLACES (n) and PLACES (v) would not be counted separately) count as separate from the root word and any other derivatives thereof.

Well, if I'm leading (somehow ), I don't think Boggle rules applied across the board is a good way to do it, simply because this is a free-for-all game and not a head-to-head one. It just doesn't really work with this format, as it would likely result in very low/zero scores for all players, and I think that raw scores should be determined solely based on the number of valid words each player makes.

This unique word rule also wouldn't work for breaking ties, as it could easily lead to a "spoiler effect" where one player in the tie is utterly screwed because someone else's word list matched theirs almost exactly. And of course, only applying this rule to the two players would break absolutely zero ties. However, we could use a different Boggle rule to break ties like this: giving more weight to longer words. And I think the best way to do this is with standard Boggle scoring (though it could stand to be modified a bit for our purposes), since it's on a roughly exponential scale already, based on the fact that longer words are generally harder to find.

For reference:

• 4 letters = 1 pt
• 5 letters = 2 pts
• 6 letters = 3 pts
• 7 letters = 5 pts
• 8+ letters = 11 pts

Personally, I would make 8+ letters 8 points instead. And of course, 8+ letter words will be quite uncommon in the first place. What's your input on this?

Oh, and with all that out of the way, the next word is KEROSENE. Once again, 4 letters minimum, and all usual rules apply.

Good: 10+ words
Excellent: 13+ words
Superb: 16+ words

I have been working on this quite a bit slower than I would have liked, but I have finally surpassed the halfway point! Currently, 48 out of 90 levels have been remade, and to celebrate (barely), I'm posting another quick teaser image of one of the levels, one that's actually somewhat significant.


Shadow 15 - Messy Mineshaft (shortened)

As a level made almost entirely made of 8-pixel staircases in the original game, it was obviously gonna be shorter here. You can also see some one-way walls and a preplaced permanent lemming to enforce something close to the original solution, but not exactly the same.

But most significant is the incinerator trap you can see near the top left. That trap actually wasn't in the NL L3 Shadow style for quite a while, even though it was in the original game. Take three guesses who remade it for NL. Though I will say, my version is nowhere near as good as the original animation, as I only had the initial frame to work with (some website had the first frame as a still image; don't remember which), and I was basing the animation off of compressed gameplay footage (because I'm unforgivably lazy), which is not viable to get accurate colors from, so I used colors from other fire animations from the official styles... Yeah... Maybe someone could do better? I don't know. It's probably fine.

A while back I saw someone mention they were looking for a Lemmings soundfont, specifically one with some Amiga instruments. I recently was reminded of this, and I thought I'd give it a try. Originally I was gonna just fill in the instruments I could with samples from the Amiga games, but then I remembered I have a program that can easily open and convert Gravis UltraSound patches, and DOS L3 has Gravis support, and indeed, TONS of instrument samples, including many sorely needed percussion samples. With all these extra instruments to play with, I figured that making a full General MIDI Level 1 soundfont with just Lemmings instruments wouldn't be too unrealistic.

Since I was already using non-Amiga samples, I decided that any Lemmings instrument samples, from any version of any game, so long as they aren't synthesized in real time or aren't just MIDI instruments, were fair game. This didn't actually increase my pool that much, mind you. It mostly meant I could use samples from the Acorn Lemmings games, SNES L1 and L2, and a couple other weird places. Technically, this included games with streamed music as well (e.g. CD soundtracks or whatever formats are used in the newer ones), but situations where you can actually get a good single instrument sample from streamed audio are few and far between. Besides, I tried to prioritize Amiga samples when possible, anyway. They're the most iconic, after all.

I was able to fill in most instruments directly, or at least use a sample that approximated it well enough, but some required some fudging since I was simply out of options, and I really didn't want two instruments to sound exactly the same as each other. So some groups of instruments in the same family share a sample, but have different samples for the attack periods. Many of the leads, pads, and effects are just combinations of other sounds, but plenty of actual MIDI synthesizers pull the same trick, so I didn't feel too bad about that. I'll admit that some of my fudged instruments sound kinda silly and some are downright scuffed. Notably, all of the solo string instruments, one of the organs, some of the instruments under the "ethnic," "percussive," and "sound effects" categories, the Voice Oohs sound, etc. Still, they're at least functional, and when used in actual tunes with other instruments, their scuffed-ness becomes less noticeable.

I did not bother supporting GS features like the ones included in Windows's default synthesizer because that would be too many percussion instruments to fudge (and I also I just really didn't feel like putting up with it) so sequences that take advantages of them will sound a little off, but not unlistenable.

The soundfont is attached below, along with a spreadsheet detailing where each instrument and percussion sample came from, if you're interested in that kinda thing. And a few Lemmings-y examples of MIDIs being played with this soundfont are linked below.

https://youtu.be/doTNCAaEj48

UPDATE 5/30/2022: I made some instruments loop and did some other stuff. I don't fully remember all the changes and I cannot be bothered to update the spreadsheet right now but here you go.

That section about 2-player mode reminded me about the rumors of the possibility of a multiplayer mobile Lemmings game in the mid-2000s I found during my research of the old mobile games. I wonder if that would have slowly brought back multiplayer Lemmings to the newer games, had it actually been made. Probably not, but one can dream.

If Sony (or whatever mobile licensee they have at the time) made a Lemmings game with a multiplayer mode nowadays, it could be online, with a friends system and random matches and possibly a level editor and all that stuff, but that'll probably never happen. The thought of it is certainly exciting though.