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Cull Disarmers, Triggered Decorations and Radiation/Slowfreeze?

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Nepster:
Lemmings-like games have the amazing feature that with a relatively small set of features, one can create a plethora of presents levels. But some ideas sound like very cool and useful additions at one time, but after they are added it turns out that they are far less useful than expected. Unfortunately we have collected a few of those over the last years:

1) Disarmers
I have actually quite a hard time naming even one puzzle level, where a disarmer could not have been easily replaced by other skills or terrain changes. There have been several levels in the recent packs Paralems (by Strato Incendus) and Casualemmings (by nin10doadict) that give you disarmers, but in almost all cases I didn't use the disarmer at all.

2) Triggered animation objects for decorations
Although they have been present for quite a while now, almost no graphic style contains them. Most prefer movable background objects instead. Moreover triggered decorations contradict player expectations: If a lemming causes some part of the level to animate, then this is doing something to the lemming.

3) Radiation objects
These are probably the most useful among the features discussed here and there are levels out there which use them in a very creative way, e.g. nin10doadict's "Thou dost ask too much!" (Hyper 4 of Casualemmings) or namida's "A Universal Production" (Twisted 14 of LemPlus IV). Still such levels are comperatively rare, while radiation objects come with other problems:
- Using timed bombers, they clash with the NeoLemmix philosophy to use instant bombers. Actually the timed bombers are pretty hard to place precisely, which adds executional difficulties which we want to avoid.
- They have an extremely diverse appearance, so players may not readily recognize them as radiation objects. Or they might confuse them with slowfreeze objects...

4) Slowfreeze objects
They have the same disadvantages than radiation objects, and seem to even less useful. The only really nice level making use of them (that I remember) is nin10doadict's "Do you feel a draft?" (Twitchy 11 of Casualemmings). But this level would work almost equally well with a radiation object instead.

All of the four features add to the complexity of the game, especially as they don't teach a new player immediately what they do: Do disarmers work on teleporters or continuous traps as well? For slowfreeze and radiation objects, the player has to wait 9 seconds until seeing a result and no way of knowing in advance whether it would be stoning or exploding. As we moved to instand bombers, they might not even recognize the number above the lemmings' heads as a countdown, if they haven't played the original game before.

For all these reasons I think that NeoLemmix would be better off without these four features. Unfortunately we already had them for quite some time and there are several levels out there using them and I don't want to incur the wrath of a lot of level designers when I suddenly decide for myself to remove all of them from NeoLemmix.
So I propose to do the following:
- Completely remove triggered animation objects and remove support for them. Currently existing objects would be automatically converted to (movable) background objects.
- Completely remove the slowfreeze objects from the game. Currently existing slowfreeze objects would just disappear. Such levels would certainly need some modification from the designer in order to be kept.
- Keep support for disarmers and radiation objects in the NeoLemmix player, but mark them as deprecated. In other words no new level should use them and you couldn't add them in the editor.

Proxima:
I agree that NeoLemmix has too many features / skills / objects for my tastes, and it makes a lot of sense to cull the least useful and most annoying ones. But the four listed above are very different from each other. The disarmer may not be very useful, but it does little harm just by existing (it makes the number of skills a prime, 17, and the player could forget which traps are already disarmed, or parse a level wrongly by not realising a disarmer is available). Triggered animations, as you say, are misleading. Radiation and slowfreeze objects are very annoying because they nearly always come with execution difficulty of getting the lemming to explode in exactly the right place. So I'd be happy to see these go, but the disarmer should be kept if there's enough existing content that uses it. It would be useful to know, for example, which of namida's packs first introduced these features and how many levels they are in, in that first pack.


--- Quote from: Nepster on September 01, 2017, 05:35:53 PM ---- Keep support for disarmers and radiation objects in the NeoLemmix player, but mark them as deprecated. In other words no new level should use them and you couldn't add them in the editor.
--- End quote ---

The trouble with this way out is that new players come along, play namida's packs, get introduced to this feature as a regular part of the game, and then wonder why they can't use it in the editor. It's really much better to take a good, hard look at exactly how much the feature is contributing, and then make a hard decision one way or another.

nin10doadict:
I'm in agreement about the triggered decorations. While they could potentially be neat, they are misleading and don't really add anything to the gameplay.
Radiation and slowfreeze levels are admittedly difficult to make without just being obnoxious. Still, I think I've helped to prove that it can be done in Casualemmings. I'm not so sure I'd like to see them just go away.
The disarmer is kind of in the same boat. There are often other ways to get around traps, but that would require giving out more skills to circumvent them, skills that could be used elsewhere to break something. Making a level where the disarmer stands out is a matter of managing the disarmer's location compared to the rest of the lemmings. I think that 'Fixed Ascent' in namida's Introduction Pack does this well.

mobius:
note: your link to Casuallemmings doesn't work

I'm probably not a very good judge on any of these things because I haven't been making many levels at all lately but anyways;

1) While I'm sad to see it suggested I must agree; I've not seen it used in an extraordinary way and I've not used it much myself. But I haven't played much of namida's or anyone's latest packs and have in general not been in a level making mood.

2) I didn't even know about this. It sounds bad.

3) I actually really don't care about either the radiation or slow freeze. I've not been even remotely inclined to use these. I don't know why they turn me off but I just never felt interested in them in the slightest.

If anything I'd support keeping disarmers but I really wouldn't be super sad if they were removed.

IchoTolot:
I must say, I really like the disarmer. I've made some nice levels with it, most of them aren't even released yet.
We are also way past the point of removal for them in my opinion. So many packs and levels make use of them now by many different people (Namida, Flopsy, GigaLem, nin10doaddict, Strato, my unreleased stuff..........). Just because it isn't the most innovative skill doesn't really justify the removal anymore at this point.

Point 2 can go no question.

I am not a fan of 3 or 4, never used them, but I would understand that the people who like using them get their will here, as my argument I made for the disarmers can be made here as well, even if those objects are way less frequent than disarmers.

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