Immediate turn-offs

[MASTER-88]

Posted my answer 1 and half year ago. My new progress pack i´ll avoid make some those type levels which i did lemmings world. I´ll agree those few levels in lemmings world was way too sharp ones and not that cunning at all.

Work new pack i´ll bit more fair about precisions.  There will be still some levels which forced me make precise level avoid backroutes. Overall i´ll more fair with this time.

Lemmings world no really got many loads like my custom +series. This pack was overall maybe way too sharp and too hard overall. I´ll make better levels with this time.

[hrb264]

It's not a total turn-off, but a minor pet peeve of mine is levels where a bunch of lemmings die in vain. Bombers are a useful destructive skill that can often justify the loss of the lemming, and sometimes a lemming performs a task but can't turn around to save itself because the skills necessary to do that would create backroutes. But then there's levels where you lose a bunch of lemmings off a cliff simply because they slip through gaps before they can be closed, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Examples from original game: From the Boundary Line, Pillars of Hercules, Poor Wee Creatures, Cascade intended solution (the 100% one seems pretty frame precise and I suspect it wasn't intended, though it wouldn't surprise me if the devs were at least aware of it based on the skillset)

I agree, it's kinda sad

[Crane]

Though not a turn off in themselves, I would say that levels where you're allowed or at least expected to lose a number of lemmings I find the hardest since you're not sure where you have to sacrifice them.  One example that springs to mind is "Stroke at Retirement Age" by geoo, where you are allowed to lose 4 lemmings but only have one Bomber and Blocker (and it's very obvious where you have to use the Blocker).  On top of being very precise it's very hard to know where you can and should make sacrifice.

Sometimes though, sacrifices are the name of the game, like with the aforementioned Cascade (I'm pretty sure the developers were aware of being able to save 100% or at least more than 10 because of being able to dig through the steps to make a wall, even if a few slip through into the abyss.  I myself have taken advantage of mass death in some of my own levels, my most famous probably being "Mincemeat" (go to 1:59):

[JawaJuice]

Stroke at Retirement Age is geeo's levels are never a cakewalk, but that was one of the hardest I've come across so far in my ongoing playthrough of the LDC pack! Certainly the hardest of the Early Contests; I've rarely come across such a precision/timing-heavy level. Wasn't a fan, if I'm honest!

If we're talking immediate turn-offs, I'm not keen on 99 RR and levels where your immediate task is making sure too many lemmings don't die before you can even think about the big picture. Frenetic, fiddly, execution-heavy levels where the difficulty stems from the precision required rather than raw problem-solving are a turn-off for me. For my money, with the best designed levels, you're not under any particular pressure and yet it's still very hard to see a path to safety. Another thing I don't particularly like is when a level relies on one or more really obscure tricks to be able to finish them - I feel this becomes more like 'do you know this trick?', rather than a test of one's problem-solving ability and logical reasoning. This is even more true when said trick could almost be described as a bug or glitch. Also: very tight time limits (time limits in general tbh), completely unintuitive/borderline illogical solutions, anything involving sliders and/or masses of teleporters Not massively keen on levels with neutrals or zombies either, but that's probably just me!

[geoo]

To give a bit of a backstory, in the early level design contents the goal was to make hard levels (rather than popular levels). The main aim was to solve as many levels as possible, so getting a hard level in gives you the edge over other players. I designed Stroke at Retirement Age with the aim that nobody could solve it, and while execution difficulty wasn't the goal it was a necessary evil I was willing to accept (especially after a few backroutes forced me to make the timing tighter). I didn't fully succeed as ccexplore managed to solve the level, but if I remember correctly it was still the level with the fewest solves in the content. Here's the old contest thread (as you can see it scored pretty low on the fun scale).

So congrats to you two for solving this one! I've always wondered how hard to figure out the level really is if you take away the execution difficulty. I feel like a lot of placements are forced, and the key novelty is the flow control which is complex but falls into place once you know when to place the key skill. Would be curious to hear your opinion.

The title was meant to be a clue to help with execution:

Spoiler

You assign the miner when there are 66 lemmings out of the hatch -- this is one of the statistics displayed in the original game and early Lemmix, I'm not sure if NeoLemmix still displays it.

In the Lix version, I could ease things up a bit by setting a fixed spawn interval to make the chain of lemmings longer, which should disadvantage the backroutes and thus allow me to give more wiggle room to the intended solution. Knowing the timing hint from the title I managed to execute the solution within 5 minutes, but I wonder how bad it is if you don't realize what it means.

The level design culture (and also my philosophy) certainly has evolved since then...

[JawaJuice]

Oh man, I wish I'd realized that I'm not the best at getting clues from titles, as @Guigui would attest (thinking of his Save One pack where I missed all the hints and insisted on doing things the hard way ). With Stroke at Retirement Age, I just brute forced the correct miner placement with a ton of trial and error lol - way more than 5 minutes, just on that bit! IIRC though, I found the hardest part was probably timing the basher correctly towards the end. I've played through all of the Early Contest levels now and for me, that was the hardest in that particular contest, although there were some other strong contenders: Pooty's A Sea of Purest Green, Proxima's Brute Fours and Insane Steve's Hole in the Head Gang spring to mind. That said, they were all toughies; I don't think I realized that making them hard was the aim of the game but it makes sense now! Perhaps by modern standards they're not so bad, although older packs can still pose a real test: I still haven't gotten beyond half way through the Sun rank of NepsterLems, for instance, despite several cracks at it! Nepster's levels are some of the hardest I've ever played - he's the author I struggle most with in all of the early contests.

Are you purely focused on Lix now, @geeo? I haven't seen your levels crop up for a while in NL LDCs (although to be fair, aside from #33, I've only played up to about 15 - got side-tracked playtesting various packs).

[kaywhyn]

Just realized I never got around to making a proper post to this topic of what my turn-offs are. Well, I'm pretty much like Armani here in that I don't really have any, as I pretty much play all levels There are, however, some designs and level elements I'm not a fan of. In particular, levels where you have to repeatedly spam the same skill, especially in a very short amount of time. Similarly, levels where the solution is obvious but is so fiddly and difficult to execute or require so much trial and error before finding the right solution tend to not be enjoyable for me

@geoo

Stroke at Retirement Age is also the final level for the New Formats NL version of Revenge of the Lemmings 4.0. I got stumped there for 4 months before I finally figured it out, so its position as the final level of the community pack is well-justified!

More information here: https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=5963.0

And oh wow, I too never caught on with the hint in the level title It makes perfect sense, though! Like probably many others, I simply thought it was just a random level title that you picked and therefore it had absolutely no connection to the level whatsoever Then again, I myself am really bad with coming up with level titles to my own stuff, so I'm not any better there

@JawaJuice

Nepster is very well-known for really hard levels, among others that are often associated with such, such as Icho, Armani, and Crane. That's not really surprising, considering Nepster was one of the NL maintainers alongside namida back in the days. Not only that, his level solving skills are legendary, even if he came really close on some packs, such as Lemmings Plus Omega 2! I don't know about my stuff, since I constantly keep thinking my levels aren't that hard, but hey, I'll let you be the judge of that when you eventually get to my other stuff in the LDC Compilation Pack As a heads up, you'll find my stuff starting at LDC #22 That reminds me, there's a few levels of mine in there that I would like to submit an updated version for, mostly to fix and tidy up the aesthetics and visuals. I honestly can't look at some of my earliest levels now without cringing at least once Like seriously, I can't believe I made some atrocious looking levels back then! In my defense, those were my earliest ones, and in general I'm not artist, and still am not  

Indeed, NepsterLems was pretty much the last really old, really hard level pack I managed to complete, after some others which are much harder, including Lemmings United, Lemmings Uncharted, and Lemmings Plus Omega 2. It truly blows me away at how very hard NepsterLems manages to be despite sticking to just the classic 8 skills! In fairness, I often switched back and forth between Lemmings United and NepsterLems back when I first started playing NL, back when I wasn't as experienced as I am now, when roadblocks came up very often for me. For example, the first major roadblock for me was Planet 13, followed by Sun 7, culminating in Black Hole 1, which went unsolved for nearly 3 years! I finally had success with the level shortly after I had just beaten LPO2 and RotL, with the latter only a few weeks after I finally figured out Stroke at Retirement Age. Because of all the experience I gained from all the custom level packs I've played and solved in between the nearly 3 years Black Hole 1 was unsolved, I proceeded to smash through the rest of the Black Hole rank in very short order At the same time, several levels in the earlier ranks IMO are much harder than most of the levels in the Black Hole rank, and I had way more roadblocks in the Planet, Sun, and Neutron Star ranks. Again, keep in mind NepsterLems was one of the earliest NL custom level packs I played, back when I wasn't as experienced as I am now.

Lemmings Stampede was another pack I rotated between Lemmings United and NepsterLems back then as well. Indeed, Wicked 5 had me stumped for a really long time, only to not surprisingly come up with a really overcomplicated solution      

[geoo]

Are you purely focused on Lix now, @geeo? I haven't seen your levels crop up for a while in NL LDCs (although to be fair, aside from #33, I've only played up to about 15 - got side-tracked playtesting various packs).

I've never actually designed a NeoLemmix level (as far as I remember). The early contests were for Lemmix (and the "no glitches" rule was already a novelty), and in later contests I submitted Lix levels. The whole NeoLemmix scene passed by me. I migrated to Linux around 2014, generally became less active and with NeoLemmix not really working on my computer the little time I spent on lemmings was for Lix. Nowadays NeoLemmix runs reasonably well in Wine (not sure about the editor), so every now and then I try to at least look at the contest submissions.

I appreciate mobius (and probably occasionally other people) remaking some of my levels for NeoLemmix though so that the NeoLemmix community also get to play them. I wasn't particularly aware of this until kaywhyn pointed me to Revenge of the Lemmings just now. Thanks for that!
I was just looking at the level list and there are some levels attributed to me that I don't even remember creating, probably from the Cheapo days. I think that'll give me the chance to solve some of my own levels from zero, which I guess is not something one often gets an opportunity to do. I should definitely play this at some point.

kaywhyn, I watched your LP for Stroke at Retirement Age, and you basically had all the skill placements down after 20 minutes. Really interesting to see that the hard part was realizing that this works if only you change the timing. And similarly interesting to know that you had a hard time with Merge Sort. For Lix I actually made a small level pack exploring these flow control ideas if you're curious. It ships with the latest Lix release.

Back in the early days I had similar trouble with tseug's Oh No, Not Again (is that in RotL as well?); it took me 4 years to solve that as my intuition for how the lemmings moved was completely off and I never thought feasible what ended up being the solution.

JawaJuice, I'm surprised timing the basher was an issue as you can release it pretty much whenever you want and just savestate back if it doesn't work. I guess if your setup in the rest of the level isn't ideal then the basher timing becomes more difficult than it should be.

[kaywhyn]

kaywhyn, I watched your LP for Stroke at Retirement Age, and you basically had all the skill placements down after 20 minutes. Really interesting to see that the hard part was realizing that this works if only you change the timing. And similarly interesting to know that you had a hard time with Merge Sort. For Lix I actually made a small level pack exploring these flow control ideas if you're curious. It ships with the latest Lix release.

Yea, I definitely plan to take a look at your Lix pack sometime I'll let you know when I am. I've already played two levels from it, which were nominations for LOTY2024 earlier this year (I'm guessing Simon nominated them?). They are Roots of Life and Just Mine.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzivNQsFb2M

Also completely unrelated, but I also uploaded solutions to your geooPkG custom Dos/Lemmix pack from about 1-2 months ago:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbp2m4KlFpJt-4qlhSQKD16P7K5AoMqmt

Back in the early days I had similar trouble with tseug's Oh No, Not Again (is that in RotL as well?); it took me 4 years to solve that as my intuition for how the lemmings moved was completely off and I never thought feasible what ended up being the solution.

I checked and nah, Oh No, Not Again isn't in the RotL v4.0 New Formats NL pack. It is, however, the final level of the Armageddon rank of the Lemmini version of RotL that mobius put together all those years ago, as well as in some earlier NL versions of the pack. That is fascinating to read that it took you 4 years to get the level solved. I didn't think it was that difficult, though I do find it amusing as the final level of the Lemmini version of RotL, when it's nowhere near the hardest level of the main part of the pack.

Speaking of tseug, I also finally solved all of their 1tseug Dos/Lemmix pack recently. Woo-wee, quite a difficult pack, but I finally managed it all after starting it quite sometime ago but didn't get very far with it back then!