Suggested Skills: Superstacker & Lightsaberer (With Sprites)

[WillLem]

In the wake of playing through the original-Lemmings-with-new-skills challenge, I've had an idea for a couple of new skills. Since I was always going for maximum saves in this challenge, I thought it would be great to have a skill that produced the same effect as a stoner (i.e. instant bit of 10-pixel-high terrain) but that was non-fatal.

Similarly, I've always thought it would be good to have a skill that performed the same terrain destruction as a bomber but, again, being non-fatal.

Allow me to present... The Superstacker and The Lightsaberer! They could probably do with better names to be fair, but the ideas are these:

The Superstacker acts exactly like a stoner, but is non-fatal: The Lemming immediately produces a brick from their rucksack and slams it down directly underneath their feet. The brick expands upwards quickly and sends them up above it. They then land on top of the newly-formed 10-pixel stack and walk off the edge. It's up for debate whether or not fallers should also be able to perform this skill in mid-air; one the one hand, it needs to have the same effect as the stoner. However, on the other hand it's very much a "rucksack" skill, none of which can be performed in mid-air. Since I'm well in favour the idea of there being a full set of non-sacrificial skills, maybe this could be modified in some way...

The Lightsaberer has the same destruction mask (more or less) as the bomber: The Lemming produces a lightsaber, opens it, and windmills their arm. The Lightsaber destroys all terrain it touches before the Lemming closes the Lightsaber. Like bombers, this would be a one-off skill that's performed in-situ, i.e. the Lemming wouldn't move in any direction.

I've attached low-res sprites of these skills so you can have a look and see if it's something worth implementing. Since the physics for stoners and bombers already exists, maybe they could form the basis for these suggested skills.

I know I am contributing a lot at the moment by the way, I'm just in a very creative mood at the mo!

[namida]

A skill this similar to an existing one is quite unlikely to get accepted, but I'll leave the topic open anyway so others can give their opinions.

However, the Graphic Sets board is very much the wrong place for this - it belongs on Bugs & Suggestions. Moved.

[Strato Incendus]

My initial, instant reaction was indeed "Why would we need something that similar to not only one, but two existing skills?", given that when I first joined the forums, I didn't even see much use in the difference between Stackers and Stoners.

My second reaction was "Well, at least you've already done a huge amount of the work by providing the sprites" , so that made this suggestion slightly more favourable to me - even though the largest amount of work would obviously be for namida to put this into the source code.

My third reaction though was "Ah, the Stacker isn't simply going slightly higher, but acts more like a Lemmings 2: The Tribes Stacker?", meaning with the lemming coming out on top.

I can indeed imagine applications for this; however, in order to be sufficiently different from the existing NeoLemmix Stacker, I think it might have to be a full-on implementation of the L2 Stacker. Meaning: With the lemming turning left and right successively, so that you can have him jump or walk off in whatever direction you choose. This actually comes up quite a lot in Lemmings 2.

Independent of whether it would be the L2- or your current version: The fact that the lemming stands on top of the stack while building it would allow scenarios where you want to build a higher stack, just like a longer Builder staircase or Platformer bridge - but without the working lemming automatically having to be a Climber to go up his own stack.

I admit I somewhat hate it when two skills "enforce" their interaction mutually, which is one of the main reasons I opposed the introduction of the Runner, because I figured it would only be somewhat useful specifically in combination with the Jumper. For the Stacker, in turn, you could argue that there should be a version that is more useful on its own, without necessarily requiring Climber usage.

This would also make this new skill more distinct from both the regular NeoLemmix Stacker and the Stoner, because building "staircases" with either of them gets really repetitive and annoying, as I'm sure many forum members will agree . Instead, you could send one non-Climber lemming ahead, lifting itself up by building this "tower", then have a second worker lemming follow later on by indeed assigning to Climber to him. Now you have to different types of worker lemmings that can interact with each other! In general, this can provide for very interesting puzzle concepts indeed.

Finally, since to my understanding, the lemming stands right in the middle of the stack he is creating, this would allow to build straight pillars that could be climbed from both sides, whereas current NeoLemmix Stacker towars always have the stack move at least one direction to the side the lemming is facing - consequently, they can only be climbed from the same direction as the lemming who initially built the stack did. This is a very effective way of unidirectionally containing Climbers, of course, but not always what you want.



The Lightsaberer, in contrast, seems about as useful to me as the Flame Thrower in Lemmings 2. Just a one-time destruction of thin terrain pieces, with a slight dip into the bottom.

I might be on board with this skill if it allowed lemmings to kill zombies as well! That would still make it narrow, but not more so than the Disarmer - and lemmings would finally have a way to "defend themselves". Yes, there are obviously fewer levels featuring zombies than triggered traps, but it's not like the Lightsaberer would be exclusively designed to kill zombies - you could still use him like a Flame Thrower, but he'd still have a separate and, most importantly, unique application beyond that.

Of course, you can imagine scenarios where the Lightsaberer would still be able to kill zombies the same way a Bomber could, i.e. by removing the terrain beneath them and having them drop to their death. The problem with this would be how close the Lightsaberer would actually have to get to the zombie - if he'd still get infected, this would be pointless. Also, if the skill acts just like the Flame Thrower, it can only kill zombies while standing on very thin stripes of terrain, rather than "always".



Finally, regarding the names:
The Superstacker, if introduced, should have a name that justifies its existence of its own - if the similarity with the Stacker is already there by design, you probably wouldn't want to point your finger at that fact with the name as well, would you? Lest it would indeed just look like a slight modification (thinking of the infamous "Super Teleporter" here ).
I'd suggest something that refers more to a tower instead of a stack, because this skill could create one seamless structure of much higher altitude than the Stacker .

The Lightsaberer - as nice as the animation in red and green looks - sounds somewhat cringe-worthy to me.
Maybe it's just that I'm fed up with Disney defiling the corpse of Star Wars, and can't wait for the strip-mining of the franchise to finally end in December - but speaking of Disney, I'm not actually sure whether the term "lightsaber" is copyrighted, i.e. owned by them now?
If the skill were to get introduced this way, I think a couple of people would build their go-to L2 Space-tileset levels with it, and then it would get left by the wayside. It should be more universally applicable - for example, in the various Castle- and Medieval tilesets we have, you'd want this skill to be a regular "Swordsman", rather than someone with a lightsaber, wouldn't you?
Calling the skill "Swordsman" might make make it easy to confuse this skill with the Fencer, though.

We could also go all the way and combine the idea of the Baseball Bat from Lix with that of the totally redundant Club Basher from Lemmings 2 - thus, we would get a destructive skill, affecting terrain like Bombers, but non-fatal, and being able to kill zombies, but with the lemming swinging a baseball bat, i.e. a more ordinary object than a lightsaber.
That would finally allow me to create a NeoLemmix level called "Beat it!"... I've always had to skip this song for my level titles in any of my music-themed packs in NeoLemmix, because it only would have made sense in Lix so far...
And while this personal concern of mine of course shouldn't be a reason for the adaptation and introduction of this skill , I do indeed think that there might be space in NeoLemmix for a skill that has a lemming wield a weapon, which does not only, like the Fencer's sword, affect terrain, but indeed also kill zombies. (Maybe even Neutrals, as a drawback?)


Or just straight-up introduce the L2 Flame Thrower and have it be the only skill that can kill zombies all by itself. This would actually make sense from a flavour standpoint - undead creatures you usually have to burn to prevent them from getting up again.


In general, when it comes to destructive skills that remove a shape of terrain similar to the Bomber, I think a better case can be made for one of the various projectile skills from Lemmings 2 (Mortar, Bazooker, or Laser Blaster for destructive skills, Thrower / Spearer / Archer / Roper for creative skills). This would allow to affect terrain both creatively and destructively from the distance, which is something lemmings can't do at all at the moment. And neither the Superstacker nor the Lightsaberer would change anything about that.

The Laser Blaster from L2 would be the most useful of the destructive bunch in my opinion, because he'd also fill the gap of the repeatedly-requested "upward Digger", while the Roper would be the most versatile creative skill of these, also being able to act as a "downward Builder". Especially the Roper, though, at least if implemented exactly as in Lemmings 2, has a high risk of being broken, because it can also be abused like a regular Builder or Platformer.

[Proxima]

without the working lemming automatically having to be a Climber to go up his own stack

A Shimmier works for this as well.

[Strato Incendus]

But only if there's a low-enough ceiling so that the Shimmier stops on top of the stack.

Alternatively, a Shimmier can jump onto a stack if the lemming is standing right in front of it, and is also a Glider. But this is merely a shift of the "enforced skill combination": Either, the lemming has to be a Climber to get up the stack, or you need to assign a Glider and a Shimmier, i.e. even two additional skills, to do it.

This is something that will hopefully become much easier once we have the actual Jumper, of course. But still, it would require a skill combination (Stacker + Jumper) to get a lemming on top of its own stack - which, in contrast, is the default outcome in Lemmings 2: The Tribes.

[WillLem]

Firstly, thank you for your considered analysis of these skill suggestions - I think your comments cover pretty much everything here!

Just to respond to a couple of points:

My initial, instant reaction was indeed "Why would we need something that similar to not only one, but two existing skills?", given that when I first joined the forums, I didn't even see much use in the difference between Stackers and Stoners.

The main point of these suggestions is that they're non-fatal bombers and stoners (this gimmick having been removed from NeoLemmix, I suggest these as an optional, alternative skill). The ideal would be for the "Super Stacker" to be able to create the tower in mid-air, so as to leave behind a piece of terrain similar to the stoner - the Lemming itself would then simply walk off the edge.

My third reaction though was "Ah, the Stacker isn't simply going slightly higher, but acts more like a Lemmings 2: The Tribes Stacker?", meaning with the lemming coming out on top.

Exactly! You've pretty much covered all the positive aspects of this, the most obvious one being that this Lemming doesn't have to be a climber or a shimmier-glider to get to the other side of the stack.

However, one thing that hasn't really been discussed is the potential to have this skill replace the stoner as a creator of mid-air terrain. Maybe a re-think of the skill itself could take this idea and improve on it (could be a wizard Lemming that fires a small tower from his upturned staff, or something)...

The Lightsaberer, in contrast, seems about as useful to me as the Flame Thrower in Lemmings 2. Just a one-time destruction of thin terrain pieces, with a slight dip into the bottom.

It's a non-fatal bomber, essentially - highly useful for creating levels that need this type of terrain destruction but don't lose any Lemmings.

I might be on board with this skill if it allowed lemmings to kill zombies as well!

Haha - great idea! Who'd have thought that we'd one day be discussing the possibility of lightsaber-weilding Lemmings defending themselves against hordes of zombies. What's not to like?

The Superstacker, if introduced, should have a name that justifies its existence of its own - if the similarity with the Stacker is already there by design, you probably wouldn't want to point your finger at that fact with the name as well, would you? ...I'd suggest something that refers more to a tower instead of a stack[/b], because this skill could create one seamless structure of much higher altitude than the Stacker

Agreed. Towermaker? Obelisker? These are probably equally pants.

And yes, "Lightsaberer" as a name is dreadful - definitely need something better than this.

If anyone thinks these skills could be adapted for better names/actions but with the same result in creation/destruction of terrain, shout out on this board and I'll be happy to do some sprites if the idea gets accepted by Namida.

[namida]

It's a non-fatal bomber, essentially - highly useful for creating levels that need this type of terrain destruction but don't lose any Lemmings.

How often would there be a level that needs this type of terrain destruction and, either requires the specific individual lemming to survive or absolutely must have a 100% save requirement? In practice, I could only see it being "absolutely must have a 100% save requirement" if the reasoning behind it is to prevent a backroute that cannot be fixed any other way. "Requires the specific individual lemming to survive" may have more potential, but I'm still far from convinced it has enough to justify such a skill - I can't imagine there'd be that many cases where a level must specifically have Bomber-like destruction (no other skill would work) AND cannot somehow allow a lemming to be sacrificed to do so (I'd think the majority of cases would at worst become "you need to bring a second worker along").

[Strato Incendus]

I'd agree with namida's last post here. Plus...

However, one thing that hasn't really been discussed is the potential to have this skill replace the stoner as a creator of mid-air terrain.

...this would essentially come down to a cull of Stoners and - more importantly - regular Bombers (if the same were done for the Lightsaberer). Can you imagine how many levels that would break? Maybe not as severely as an object removed without any replacement - but still, on any level that previously required the use of Stoners or Bombers, you consequently were allowed to lose lemmings. Those levels would then be easier to backroute, because now you would be allowed to lose those lemmings elsewhere.

[Dullstar]

...this would essentially come down to a cull of Stoners and - more importantly - regular Bombers (if the same were done for the Lightsaberer). Can you imagine how many levels that would break? Maybe not as severely as an object removed without any replacement - but still, on any level that previously required the use of Stoners or Bombers, you consequently were allowed to lose lemmings. Those levels would then be easier to backroute, because now you would be allowed to lose those lemmings elsewhere.

Making matters worse, there wouldn't really be a way to automate (either by script or by a human repetitively making the same kind of change to each level) level changes to avoid massive breaks to existing content: if the lemming is allowed to stay alive, then the save requirements will be off. You might think you could simply add one to the save requirement for each bomber/stoner in the skillset, but in some levels, the excess lemming this would create wouldn't have been accounted for in the design process, and therefore might still be impossible to save. Plus, some levels give you more bombers/stoners than you actually need. Thus, to update existing content to account for the change, each pack maintainer (whether this is the original creator or someone else) would have to go through all of their levels containing these skills (which would be a lot of levels) and manually update the save requirements on a case-by-case basis.

---

I don't think such a cull is under consideration, of course, but it should go without saying that such a proposal would be met with heavy opposition. That said, I think non-fatal bombers did at one time exist as a gimmick. But I think to be convinced that non-fatal variants of these skills are a good idea, I'd need to see examples of situations where this makes a level design cleaner than simply letting the player lose a few lemmings.

[Strato Incendus]

if the lemming is allowed to stay alive, then the save requirements will be off.

Not only that, but the mere fact that a formerly dead lemming now keeps walking around in the level can cause all kinds of other problems, especially when that lemming then walks into a release-rate-sensitive triggered object, like a trap or teleporter, or reverses a splitter that was originally reversed by a different lemming at a later time, and so on. Meaning: Even if every replay file could be "refreshed" (like with the already existing Replay Refresher Tool) to replace every skill use of a Stoner or Bomber with the non-fatal version, this would still mess up the assignment of other skills to other lemmings - sometimes more, sometimes less directly. But it would definitely be bound to happen on a considerable amount of levels.

That said, I think non-fatal bombers did at one time exist as a gimmick. But I think to be convinced that non-fatal variants of these skills are a good idea, I'd need to see examples of situations where this makes a level design cleaner than simply letting the player lose a few lemmings.

Yes, they did - this gimmick is part of the "Eternal" rank in my pack "Lemmicks" (together with the "Hardworkers" and "Permanent Blockers" gimmick, thus making all skills as long-lasting as possible, hence the rank name). Strangely enough, this gimmick only applied to Bombers, not to Stoners. Then again, the gimmick was indeed only called "non-fatal Bombers", not "non-fatal lethal skills".

There was however also the "invincible" gimmick, which I used later in the "Bedlam" rank of Lemmicks. This prevented lemmings from dying in any other way than by falling off the screen - they couldn't splat, they couldn't drown or burn in fire objects (they'd simply fall through those), they couldn't trigger traps, and consequently, they also couldn't die from bombing or stoning either. It was still possible to use those skills, though - in case of the Stoner, the surviving lemming would then simply drop down beside the newly created Stoner terrain, facing in the opposite direction (because he turned around on his own Stoner terrain).

[WillLem]

...this would essentially come down to a cull of Stoners and - more importantly - regular Bombers (if the same were done for the Lightsaberer).

Surely a level designer could choose to use either? I would never suggest culling those skills, but rather presenting a non-fatal alternative so that it's possible to create a pack where 100% saves are possible but without compromising on the usefulness of these skills (Bombers and Stoners) to create interesting levels.

[Strato Incendus]

Well, if you talk about "replacing" Bombers and Stoners, that's what people are going to believe...

However, one thing that hasn't really been discussed is the potential to have this skill replace the stoner as a creator of mid-air terrain.

so that it's possible to create a pack where 100% saves are possible but without compromising on the usefulness of these skills (Bombers and Stoners) to create interesting levels.

There's an easy way to do this:
- create the level as you intend it to be with regular Bombers and Stoners
- right in front of the exit, to make sure they can't be used earlier, place an equal amount of Cloner pickups

Done!

[namida]

...this would essentially come down to a cull of Stoners and - more importantly - regular Bombers (if the same were done for the Lightsaberer).

Surely a level designer could choose to use either? I would never suggest culling those skills, but rather presenting a non-fatal alternative so that it's possible to create a pack where 100% saves are possible but without compromising on the usefulness of these skills (Bombers and Stoners) to create interesting levels.

If they replace them, it breaks a lot of existing levels. If they're new skills, they don't add much value, because they mostly do what another skill already does. "They make more levels 100%able" is not even close to a good enough reason to add a near-duplicate skill, because there's no inherent reason that any level needs to be 100%able.

I'm sorry to say it, but I'm almost certain at this point that these two skills will not be happening.