For manual steel and invisible and fake objects, it would require additional effort to include support for them in the new-formats editor,
See, these are the types of changes I can totally understand. Extra work for something barely anyone uses? The cost-benefit analysis clearly says no. But additional required effort, as far as I remember, wasn't on the list of problems concerning slowfreeze.
That's a loss, but it's one we're prepared to accept because of the gain to puzzle possibilities. After all, there are lots of other games that reward execution skill, but not many playgrounds for the kind of puzzle design we enjoy.
Well, I'm working on "Pit Lems", refering to another such puzzle game "Pit Droids". That one will be purposefully more puzzly, and I shall see how that one is received by the community. It does have quite a lot of radiation and slowfreeze though, so I hope people keep their 10.13 version for quite some time, still
.
PARALEMS has also been overhauled, but there are a couple of people still playing the current version, so I want to include their feedback before I upload the new version. That one obviously also still has slowfreeze and anti-splat pads, and I'm not planning to change that.
In case new skills or similar would be added to the new version, I'd try it out and see what ideas I come up with, for example for the shimmier in case it should be implemented. But should the new version only be a "reduction", while it would be understandable for me considering all the effort it takes to add new skills, personally I wouldn't see a purpose in using it when 10.13 could simply do more.
Size also doesn't define difficulty - the tricks and entropy of the level does.
I never claimed it does
. I'd actually prefer more "contained levels" like "Mining company". Huge levels are great when they match the provided resources exactly, so that there's a danger of running out of them, like on "Final Frustration". However, a lot of puzzly levels I've seen so far are just "huge landscape spanning the entire screen, here's XX of every skill, go!"
These levels take a long time to solve mainly because of their
execution . Scarcity of resources only rarely makes these levels more complicated, usually playing along a couple of general guidelines is enough to save resources (like "can I afford to go down here? Then I should use a miner and save the bashers for where I need them.").
Unfair things have to go, I'll make no prisoners here and I just despise them.
Well, I appreciate people standing up for their opinion, and even when they're convinced of it to a missionary extent that could be called a "crusade" for "puzzles only". Different players have different playing philosophies
. However, as soon as one philosophy proclaims itself as the only "right" one, and this idea coincides with the removal of features that would be feasable for alternative views, that is what I call enforcing an ideology.
Having just played through the gimmicks rank of the old 1.43 introduction pack (thanks again to Nepster!), now I'm even less inclined to blame specific features for shortcomings of levels: A lot of these gimmicks that are gone now, at least in the form they were conceptionalised in, actually
increased the amount of puzzling for me, even though on the surface all these gimmicks may just seem like random crazy stuff. Meaning:
Sometimes you might throw out something just because you currently believe it conflicts with your philosophy, but it might turn out later that is not actually the case.I admit that for radiation and slowfreeze, that probability is lower because they overlap with the discarded idea of timed bombers.
If you're for an all puzzle approach, it would make more sense to me to throw out radiation and slowfreeze together and keep anti-splat pads and splat pads as a unit, rather than one of each, which feels kinda half-hearted.
I absolutely hate cheaters and abusers of unfair elements.
But the "cheater" in that scenario is the level creator, not the player, if I get that correctly?
All the stuff we do with our nice convenient NeoLemmix features would totally be cheating by original Lemmings standards. And if the standards for what is cheating and what is not aren't universal, neither are the standards for what is fair or not.
@Nepster: Yes, I think you've summarised my position pretty much spot-on
. The idea is: If 10.13 has radiation and slowfreeze and the new version has neither, there will be more differences setting apart the two versions, thereby more players who are on the fence about radiation / slowfreeze who will keep 10.13 installed. Different iterations of NeoLemmix for different uses, I'm fine with that! (1.43 for gimmicks, 10.13 for radiation / slowfreeze, new-format for shimmiers and whatever you might add
).