Lemmings Boards > Level Design

What makes a level / pack feel like Lemmings?

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Strato Incendus:
Yeah, what I'm aiming for is "can I recreate the positive feelings about old Lemmings, i.e. the nostalgia, but also conceptual challenges like No added colors or lemmings, without the frustration from back in the day that resulted from execution issues?" ;)

I should therefore probably rephrase my initial goal (and thereby shift the goalposts :evil:): It shouldn't strictly feel like a DMA pack; it should feel as if DMA had learned from their fans' concerns :D !

Prime example: Lemmings Redux. That was made up entirely of original levels. Can we recreate something like that out of custom levels? That doesn't seem like an unreasonable goal to me.

namida:
One thing I definitely agree on is your point about other-game-rip graphic sets, to the point that I wondered at one point if I even should release graphic editing tools because I knew it would happen. But I guess at the end of the day - it's up to the community, not one developer, to decide if such becomes acceptable or not. But to me it just feels kind of cheap and tacky as a full blown graphic set (of course, a single reference level like the special graphics levels from Orig is another matter - those are tributes, not shameless rips).

Proxima:
From the player's point of view, it doesn't matter whether the tribute levels come from graphics sets or single images. The graphics sets are just a convenience so that if anyone else wants to do a tribute to the same game, they don't have to redo all the same work. 8-)

This was something we did back in the Cheapo days, with Insane Steve's Mario style and my Repton, Prince of Persia and Minesweeper. There may have been others, I don't remember all the graphics sets that existed back then and wouldn't necessarily recognise some of them as coming from other games :P

Nessy:
I never saw other-game-rip graphic sets as something that's tacky or even shameless which might be a bit too extreme of an adjective to use in my opinion. In my mind they were just another graphic set for the Lemmings to interact with. It allows us to create puzzle levels with it just like any other graphic set whether it's based on another game or not.

So to support this:


--- Quote from: Strato Incendus ---That's not what I said ;) ; it's just that it feels less like original Lemmings then, and more like e.g Sonic instead.
--- End quote ---

How can this game ever be like Sonic, or Dune, or Freedom Planet? Just because, for example, someone uses one of the Sonic graphic sets in their levels the game won't suddenly turn into Sonic. They are two completely different things that go beyond visuals. The same exact thing with other graphic sets based on other video games. They are just another landscape from a pure visual perspective and making a graphic set around it isn't always something you can do quickly so I wouldn't call it cheap :P especially since not everyone is an artist and can make a graphic set from scratch but they still want to contribute.

Strato Incendus:

--- Quote ---How can this game ever be like Sonic, or Dune, or Freedom Planet?
--- End quote ---

For example if the level features a lot of vertical scrolling, buttons and pickup skills. Games like e.g. Sonic Jump feature more vertical than horizontal movement, and things you can collect by walking through or jumping on them. Vertical scrolling was only introduced in Lemmings 2 (I don't remember any Lemmings 3 levels having vertical scrolling); pickup skills were exclusive to Lemmings 3. None of the original two games Lemmings and ONML featured either, and when you average across all Lemmings games, including Lemmings Revolution, the common denominators are indeed still "no pickup skills, no buttons, no vertical scrolling".

Vertical scrolling gets a little more of a pass because of Lemmings 3D. In Lemmings Revolution, you were only able to scroll vertically when you had already zoomed in - the standard layout of all the cylinder-style levels did not require any vertical movement of the camera.

So while buttons, pickup skills and vertical scrolling have become pretty commonplace in NeoLemmix, they're also some of the main things that make NeoLemmix feel very different from any other Lemmings engines. They had to be added to the standard game later on, because the template did not include them, obviously. So while they are NeoLemmix exclusives, they are also where NeoLemmix strays from the original game the most - aside from the additional skills, of course. But the additional skills at least still look like lemmings performing them, and in most cases are even based on actual original Lemmings sprites: Glider = floater, disarmer = digger, platformer = builder, or now, in New Formats, the platformer animation is inspired by Lemmings 2, I believe, just like the swimmer and, presumably, also the shimmier and jumper are going to be.


--- Quote ---They are just another landscape from a pure visual perspective and making a graphic set around it isn't always something you can do quickly so I wouldn't call it cheap :P especially since not everyone is an artist and can make a graphic set from scratch but they still want to contribute.
--- End quote ---

I wouldn't consider it cheap, in fact I think GigaLem's Freedom Planet tilesets are among the best looking ones we currently have. That said, GigaLem has done both, "compiling" tilesets from sprites from other games as well as improving namida's existing sprites. I can understand where namida is coming from, though, because once you're a little familiar with Photoshop, or Paint, or similar programs, you can let a couple of standard effect like bevel and emboss do the heavy lifting for you with regards to lighting, texture, 3D-illusions etc. to make your self-drawn graphic sets really come to life. You don't even need to be a great painter for that, since colour gradients and standard shapes like polygons and circles can all be taken care of by the software. As long as you can draw some rough outward lines for whatever shape you desire, you're fine.

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