Lemmings, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll

[ccexplore]

Can you show what it looks like for the same level as in the first picture, if you swap it with the L3 Lab's water?

FWIW the shade of green in the first picture looks fine to me.  Using the L3 Lab water there may well be too green, for a tileset that seems to have relatively muted colors (it seems mostly gray and white).

[namida]

FWIW the shade of green in the first picture looks fine to me.  Using the L3 Lab water there may well be too green, for a tileset that seems to have relatively muted colors (it seems mostly gray and white).

For reference, here's how the L3D space style looks in contrast to its slime. It stands out a lot there too.

This image is from a custom level, but it's quite accurate to how the respective tiles are used in official levels.

[Strato Incendus]

Thanks for the screenshot, namida! Here's the same level "Space oddity" again with darker green water, I personally think it looks better, and also more accurate to the original L3D style:



And, here's another country level - one major nation that didn't make it into LWT :


I am cow

Naturally, this also counts as an Outdoor level.

[Strato Incendus]

I hope I'm not Hanoi-ying you too much with more landscape levels?

Here's another army level, with a fitting title...


Camouflage

...and another medieval one...


The Great Wall of China

These two are also attached and ready to play!

Both are intended to go into the easiest of the four main ranks, "Sober".

[Strato Incendus]

I just finished watching Money Heist (La Casa de Papel) and am eagerly awaiting the fifth and final season!

The solution to the following level may thus contain possible spoilers for seasons 1 and 2.


Bella ciao

Keep in mind this is not a movie- or TV-themed pack, but whenever a show heavily leans on a particular song, that increases its chances of a reference slipping in here.

In case you haven't seen the show and the flags are understandably confusing you in terms of where this level is located geographically, the flag on the right is the one indicating the location.

Here is another place that fell a little short in Lemmings World Tour:


Lem e som oss

That said, I must be careful not to dilude the main theme of this pack with too many geography levels now.

First and foremost, this is still a Lemmings-3D-inspired pack. So here are some more levels imitating those tilesets:

CANDY

Life is a lemon and I want my money back


CIRCUS

The Time Warp


Air balloon


LEGO / CLASSICAL

Forever young


Jump (Part Two)


She's so high


Shut up and fence with me


EGYPTIAN

Tell Lara I love her

Guess which sprite(s) I'm using here .


MEDIEVAL

The heart asks bashers first


I am a Lem and I'm digging a hole


MAZE / FOREST / OUTDOOR

The swimmer takes it all


Schody (Czech for "staircase")


GOLF / SPORTS

We've found Lems in a hopeless place


Those balls are perfect

This second one was actually indeed "sung" by a sports star, namely none other than Tom Brady... Look it up on YouTube...
The makers of the video, schmoyoho, are certainly also going to have a lot of fun with the US election debates again this year.


ARMY / ALPINE

Big Dig

This one is a symptom of this year's (cancelled) Eurovision season introducing me to the famous Russian rave band Little Big...


Gliders on the storm

[Strato Incendus]

"Pluto, Pluto - you're cold and far, and not even a planet;
Venus, Venus - too much CO2;
Mars, Mars, Mars, Mars - ain't enough magnetosphere;
There's only one place I wanna go!

Saturn, Saturn - your rings vibrate and I hesitate;
Jupiter, Jupiter - you're gassy and brown;
Neptune, Neptune - a huge calippo too big to swallow;
There's only one place where we can go!

Gonna head right to..."


Uranus



Thanks to Nanowar of Steel ft. Michael Starr (from Steel Panther), I could make this level as a follow-up to "I'm your Venus" from Lemmings World Tour.

Both are also likely going to re-appear in a future astronomy-themed pack named Lemmings Universe.

And in the meantime, I'm uploading this level and the replay, so that "everybody can enjoy the view... of Uranus."

[Strato Incendus]

I recently had a strangely awesome idea... and now I've finally gathered up the insanity to implement it. Depending on your point of view, it can be a cool or a nasty surprise.
But either way, a surprise. So I don't want to ruin it for those who prefer to be surprised... but then again, most puzzle fans don't... so I also want to be fair.
And of course I'm also impatient and want to share this, because I don't think anyone else has done this so far.

Although, I vaguely recall WillLem having tried something like this with custom sprite recolourings... I don't know whether he changed it later, though, or whether he "got away with it"...

Anyways, click on the following spoiler tag at your own peril. It contains information about a tutorial level called:

Pitch-black universe (which is a song by the Finnish dark-metal band Before the Dawn) (click to show/hide)

As outlined in the starting post, this pack is inspired by Lemmings 3D above all else.

Remember how Lemmings 3D had levels on the Practice rank forcing you to use its new features? Like Highlight Lemming and Virtual Lemming?
There were even some levels in the main ranks that placed all cameras inside a restricted area - famously "The Prisoner" - so that you absolutely had to solve them in first person.

Well, with this important context in mind, so that you don't just consider this pointless trolling, I made the ultimate level to enforce / teach a new player to use clear-physics mode:


Pitch-black universe

First of all, thanks a lot to Colorful Arty for enabling this madness!
Clearly, he did his best to prevent such shenanigans by making the default background for his Silhouette tileset (that is, if you don't use the orange one that comes with it) completely white.

Thus, this wasn't as easy as simply hitting "clear background" in the editor, because even if most other tilesets have a default black background, none of them actually include it as a graphic.
And in turn, if I had set the level's main theme to a different one than Silhouette, then the staircases, platforms, stacks etc. and, most of all, the lemmings themselves would have become visible again.

I was about to go out of my way to deliberately add a black background graphic to my strato_generalmd tileset (like everyone's special tileset they use for custom additions).

But then, I discovered this background from one of GigaLem's Freedom Planet sets, which fits the title even better. You do still see something, and indeed you see a universe... and yet, you see nothing. Maybe the hatch, the exit, and the trap, but none of the terrain. Even the reflections of the water in the bottom left corner can just look like additional stars in this screenshot. Of course, once you start the level, you will see the water moving.

Fortunately, Arty's Silhouette tileset doesn't include triggered traps. The one thing I confused for a masher trap turned out to be a teleporter (and I was wondering why it didn't do anything... well, of course, I hadn't placed any receiver in the level, because I didn't want any teleporters in it in the first place). But there is a completely black version of the Marble slasher fire trap, so I used that one instead.

Hidden traps are bad because they can surprise you.
But hidden lemmings and completely hidden terrain - well, that just forces you straight into clear-physics mode, so that no nasty surprises remain.

[Strato Incendus]

Now that Lemmings Open Air has been released, I can focus my development efforts back on my other two music packs. Here are some more L3D-inspired ones, and some more artistic ones - two things which ideally shouldn't be mutually exclusive, as you will see in a minute...


CANDY

Pix 'em, Lix 'em, Stix 'em!


Fat-bottomed Lems


LEGO / CLASSICAL

That's the way (I like it)

Somebody once said Lemmings "brings out the worst in him". I think we all can perfectly relate to that feeling whenever we rage-quit some level .
However, this particular individual also happens to be an avid fan of a certain musician :


Lemmings gets the best of me

This one was my brother's school graduation song back in 2015. And there happens to be a certain L3D level which goes along very nicely with it:


Ten feet tall

Man, I really need to pick one sky background for all these Lego / Classical levels and use it consistently... Although that also would make it a little more boring. The Lego levels are hard enough to distinguish from the Circus levels to begin with, because both mainly use the L2 Circus tileset. I just try to make more use of the diagonally-coloured pieces for Circus, as well as using the tent from L2 Circus as the exit. For the Lego levels, in contrast, it's always the L2 Shadow hatch + the namida Psychedelic exit, because they look the closest to the original "brick-block structure" .


ALIEN / SPACE
The very first level, "Walkin' after midnight", originally looked just like a regular L2 Shadow level (see opening post). Thus, I had to redesign it to make it look more in line with my other emulations of the L3D Alien tileset. I didn't actually delete it, I just placed the new pieces over the old ones, to make sure everything was in the same position as before, and then sent them to the background via the "Draw first" button, so that I could delete the old pieces in the front.
This is what the very first level looks like now:


Walkin' after midnight




HOUSE / OUTDOOR / MAZE
The Jaimie House tileset is really proving itself extremely valuable for this pack, probably on par with namida's Candy tileset. In fact, the water from the Candy tileset is used on this level for the "mud" . This is another one for the Virgin rank (which takes the place of the Practice rank in original L3D), and I think it's obvious what skill is the main focus here. My vocal coach recently somewhat "challenged" me to do this song - it wasn't as difficult for me as he probably expected it to be, though   ...


Like a stone



ARMY
If you have played a bit of Lemmings Open Air already, you may have noticed that I tried to stick to the original graphic-set structure (with regards to what levels are at which positions within a rank) as much as possible. The same thing I'm trying to do here on Lemmins, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll! (It's not really applicable to Lemmings: Hall of Fame because I'm straying from the Tribe structure there anyway, meaning you won't be playing 10 levels per tribe in a row.)

Thus, I was wondering what type of level I could put in the position of the original L3D level "Lemmhanger" (Tricky 26), with the big aeroplane. And then I remembered a certain relatively new song by the Swedish History Metal band Sabaton...


The Red Baron

[Strato Incendus]

Thanks a lot to namida for his instructions how to set up the level editor for Lemmings 3D, L3DEdit! I've started extracting some of the graphics, and I'm going to make them available for NeoLemmix peace by peace. I'm not promising I'll do them all, but instead of just placing this into an "Army" tileset, I am now working on a "strato_l3d" tileset that is supposed to contain as much stuff from L3D as possible - mainly background objects.

This is what one of the levels shown earlier looks like with the army guy (I've just named him "trainer" now ).


When the Lems go marching in

[Strato Incendus]

I've been thinking about this for a while, so I want to probe the community preferences on some things regarding the number of levels and ranks in this pack:

By default, Lemmings, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll would be a comparatively small pack, with only 100 levels (=like Pit Lems). 20 of those however would be the Virgin rank, which takes the place of the Practice rank in Lemmings 3D. That leaves only 80 levels for the main ranks, 4 x 20. And a few of these are already taken by "Geography levels". Now of course, ideally a level should be both a geographic location AND clearly attributable to one of the L3D tilesets (works especially well with the Egyptian ones). But it doesn't always work out, of course. And I'm a little worried that the L3D theme might be diluted by the Geography levels, or in turn that there are going to be too few geographic locations covered because the L3D-tileset-inspired levels take up the majority of the pack.

So the first question would be whether I should increase the number of levels per rank to 30, as is standard. I would definitely not go beyond that, so this pack will never reach the same dimensions as Lemmings World Tour. Having been one of the testers of Lemmings United and trying to play it again now (alongside some other packs), I can certainly feel that from a player perspective, 40-level-ranks feel very exhausting, because it always seems like the next milestone is still that far away.

Increasing the level number per rank to 30 would also allow for a more appropriately extensive Virgin / Practice rank. The original L3D had an individual level for each skill, but of course it only featured the classic 8, plus the Turner, and then the rest of the levels were about introducing various objects.

NeoLemmix already has so many skills that an individual level per skill would have been way too much. So most of the skills are introduced in pairs. And skills that appeared on previous levels can also feature on those levels, so that the skillset gradually becomes more and more complex, even within the Virgin rank already. And then, just like in L3D, there are definitely going to be a couple of levels about the specific controls of NeoLemmix - which partly overlap with L3D even, like Highlight Lemming (but there's also Clear-Physics Mode, Rewinding, Arrow Keys, Framestepping etc.).


The second big question is: How would you guys feel about another Groupie rank again? A lot of new members have joined the forums since I've made Lemmings World Tour, and some of them have already made multiple packs even - yet I haven't had the chance yet to emulate their level design style. Of course, if you've already had a level dedicated to you in Lemmings World Tour, that would not automatically exclude you from getting another one this time. Especially not if you're still an active forum member.

I got the impression that the Groupie rank received a lot of positive reception in Lemmings World Tour, and everyone had fun guessing which level was theirs.

I wouldn't call it "Groupie" this time, though, because I'd like to stick with adjectives, like for the main ranks. My current suggestion for this rank, sticking with the music theme, would be "Plagiarized" .


So in short, there are four options that will ultimately determine the total size of this pack:
- stick strictly to L3D size (100 levels = 20 practice levels + 80 main levels)
- L3D size plus Groupie rank (120 levels, because I want all ranks to have the same size)
- extend rank size to 30 (150 levels = 30 practice levels + 120 main levels)
- extended rank size plus Groupie rank (180 levels)

In case I do add a Groupie rank, of course that leaves the question open which tilesets I should use. Should the Groupie levels stick to L3D tilesets, so that they feel like bonus levels of the main pack? Or should I keep the approach from LWT where the tileset choice is part of the level building style of the given user (possibly including custom tilesets by that user as well)?

[Will]

As a general rule, I always think that less is more. 20 well-presented, neatly trimmed and substantial levels is more attractive a prospect than 40 "kitchen-sink" levels.

30 may seem like a nice round number because original Lemmings has 30-per-rank, but:

a) it was the first ever Lemmings game, so is bound not to get everything right. Note that most subsequent official games reduced the number of levels per rank, with 20 becoming more of a go-to (Oh No! More Lemmings and Lemmings 3D being ready examples). And, OK, Lemmings 3 had 30 in each, but there were only 3 ranks!

b) 30+ per rank always feels like slightly too much. I've played a number of packs with more than 25, and it does start to feel like it just keeps on going. This is not so bad in a pack like Casualemmings, where the levels are designed to be easy and quickly playable, but in a pack of bona-fide difficult puzzle levels, 20 is more than enough.

Momentum is the key here: the player should always feel spurred to continue on. Regular "checkpoints" help with that

[Strato Incendus]

While Lemmings: Hall of Fame is still on halt in its development until the new skills roll around, Lemmings, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll isn't!

It's time to p-p-p-p-p present you two more levels.


Among the shadows


Ol' Blue-Eyes is back

I mean, that's totally what Frank Sinatra was referring to with this album title, right?

I hope neither of these puzzles will take you a millennium to solve, but they will require a slight update to my strato_generalmd tileset... including a recolouring of the Medieval dragon trap.
You know - for "Ol' Blue-Eyes"...

[Strato Incendus]

Okay, in terms of song titles alone, some of these choices are getting pretty obscure. But not everyone here cares that much about music, so if I can use an obscure song to secretly refer to something completely different - something comparatively famous within its respective community - maybe that's a good way to ensure everyone can at least recognise some things?


Weight of the World

[Strato Incendus]

One more level referring to the same game - it's funny how we have enough tilesets now to basically recreate the diverse landscape of an entire map of a role-playing game in NeoLemmix:


The end is NieR

Granted, I had to go for the maximum width possible in New-Formats NeoLemmix (2400 pixels), but that was totally worth it...

I also made matching white-and-black YoRHa sprites to go along with it - the Zombies wear the black face masks...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

...as it happened to have been the case when they got infected by the logic virus.

[Strato Incendus]

Here are a few more that are also going to feature the new skills (Slider and Laserer):

CIRCUS


Slide it in (Part II)


The Shoop Shoop Song

ALIEN


I have a beam


All my diggas look rich as f*ck

ARMY


Bang Bang (My Lemming shot me down)

GOLF / SPORTS


Soon may the Wellerlem come

While Lemmings World Tour featured "Royals" by Lorde and "Something in the Water" by Brooke Fraser, there wasn't actually any song located in or close to New Zealand yet.
But for this one, we certainly need "all hands on deck"...