Wow, really? I think we'll just have to agree to disagree here: I see way more in NeoLemmix than it just being a puzzle game.
I get it - but somehow there usually only seems to be one person at a time who sees it that way
. It used to be me a couple of years ago. Now it's you.
NeoLemmix has developed far beyond the original Lemmings in many ways, no doubt about it. However, the game from which it evolved has that explore & discover mentality as well as being a picture-puzzle game.
It would be very sad for it to completely lose that element of gameplay.
I think it already has lost it. Not because it wouldn't be possible to create such levels - as you've demonstrated, you clearly can - but simply because there is no market for such levels.
I get why you're upset about one specific level-design philosophy prevailing.
I was as well, and sometimes still am. But the problem is not so much the philosophy itself, and it's prevalence is also just a symptom.
The actual problem is the small size of our community. In games with larger fanbases, there is usually "enough space for everyone to enjoy the game their own way". Say, for example, there are a bunch of different ways and formats to play Magic: The Gathering, and everyone can enjoy a different one. That's because the game has an active player base of several million people - this forum, in contrast, has not even yet cracked 1,000 visitors ever.
Now, this is not meant as "we're this small, sworn-in community who have agreed on these rules, so you must abide by our 'laws'!"
, quite the opposite. It simply means that the target audience for any custom lemmings pack is very small already from the getgo. Given how much time and effort it takes to create any level pack, you probably don't want to chase away the few "custom-level customers"
that are available. And as you acknowledged yourself, this has already started affecting your level design:
I'm having to edit my levels and curb my creative tendencies to suit others' preferences; I'm fine with this because ultimately I do want people to enjoy my packs and I don't want to be seen as an unnecessary troublemaker
While you're of course still free to design your levels in whatever way you please, if you include a lot of unpopular elements, it will simply lead to fewer people playing those levels, and eventually maybe even your packs as a whole - and there aren't even that many people around here to begin with.
Look at the view counts the Let's Play videos get, those usually remain under 200 for their entire lifetime.
but it would be good to understand the reasons I'm making such sacrifices.
Sure, I'll happily try outline what I can identify as "reasons" in terms of "rational arguments" that go beyond mere personal taste 
- because if a majority of forum members just say that they have a personal preference for "strict puzzles", that personal taste is hard to argue with.
First of all...
Features are added based mainly on the whims of whoever's programming the game.
Yep, and features were also removed mainly on the whims of whoever was programming the game .Currently, we see namida putting in a lot of effort to add more features to the game in very short time spans, which I greatly applaud!
However, there was also a time when namida wasn't active in the further development of NeoLemmix, and a different user and moderator named Nepster was the "lead developer" of NeoLemmix.
Especially during the time of transitioning from Old Formats to New Formats (text-based),
Nepster went on what is now sometimes infamously referred to as the "Culling Frenzy", where he tried to use the opportunity of format transition to get rid of a lot of stuff that the community had barely used or that the majority didn't like. And then, there were also some features he proposed to "cull" even though there wasn't really a reason to.
For example:
- Nepster was the driving force behind the abolishment of anti-splat pads, arguing that in most cases, their effect is indistinguishable from that of updrafts (=landing on terrain inside an updraft). The main difference is obviously that lemmings can fall through an anti-splat pad that has no terrain inside it and still splat beneath it, whereas falling through an updraft resets the fall height. This can be used for puzzles, albeit it wasn't done frequently.
- Nepster initiated the removal of Slowfreeze objects and was willing to keep Radiation around as a compromise, because it had been used more frequently. I personally enjoyed both Radiation and Slowfreeze, and even though many people disliked the execution difficulty that came with them, I had actively been working towards better and fairer level design involving these objects that reduced the execution difficulty. Eventually, when it was clear that Slowfreeze wouldn't survive the formats change, I argued for removing Radiation as well, because both were really two sides of the same coin (objects that turned lemmings into Bombers / Stoners with a countdown like in original lemmings, with that countdown starting at 9 rather than 5). It didn't make sense to have one but not the other. As such, there was never a version of New Formats that included Radiation but not Slowfreeze; both objects never even made it to New Formats in the first place.
- Nepster proposed to abolish the option of flipping teleporters or receivers. The argument was that you couldn't tell in which a lemming would be facing when coming out of the receiver, because if you flip either of those two objects, the lemming will be turned around by the teleport, whereas otherwise, he will walk into the same direction as before. This was something that IchoTolot objected to heavily, because he had made use of this quite a bit in his levels.
- At one point Nepster even suggested to remove the Disarmer skill, because it was barely being used. This idea however received enough resistance quickly enough to be discarded, even though the Disarmer probably remains the least popular skill.
The main cause of all those heated arguments around the time of the Culling Frenzy was that Nepster had explicitly stated a certain lack of respect for existing content. (I think he literally said at one point: "Existing levels are irrelevant.") In other words, even if a feature was being used, if it just wasn't used frequently enough, he proposed culling it despite the damage it would have caused to existing content, with the
supposed goal of simplifying the game for new players by giving them fewer new features to worry about and memorize.This was kind of easy to say for him, though, because his own packs - NepsterLems and Return of the Tribes - largely or even exclusively stick to the classic 8 skills and adhere to this strictly-fair puzzle philosophy
.
Therefore, at some point we were joking that eventually, anything that wasn't part of classic lemmings could potentially get the axe some day.
To this day, I have never understood the benefit of removing features from NeoLemmix, because new players could always be pointed to the Introduction pack, or to packs sticking to classical skills, to make sure they wouldn't get overwhelmed.
Let me be absolutely clear here that, as critically as I've summarised this debate from my point of view, I don't want to throw shade at Nepster. I admire the work and effort he put in to get NeoLemmix from Old Formats to New Formats, and to maintain the game for everyone, even at times when basically nobody else was doing it and he had to do all the work (or so it seemed to me, I don't know to what extent namida was active behind the scenes?
). And his level packs continue to be held in high regard by practically everyone here on the forums.
It was simply a natural consequence of him being the sole programmer at that time that all the power over the game resided with him. I'm not saying he "abused" that power, not at all, he did ask for community opinion on most of the decisions he made. But if he, as the guy who had to program all this stuff at the end of the day, decided a certain, less-frequently-used feature wasn't worth the time and effort for him - next to all the programming work the "standard stuff" already took, to just get the game to work in the first place - then of course nobody could force him to spend even more of his free time on adding / keeping a feature in NeoLemmix that he considered pointless.
Meaning, the
"strictly-fair puzzles only" mentality, at least in my view, became even stronger after the transition from Old Formats to New Formats. In Old Formats, you still had all kinds of troll features, like manual steel, invisible and fake objects etc. that could potentially be exploited to create unfair levels, even though few people actually did so. New Formats, in contrast, was trying to be "clean and serious", and at that time, to me this equated "no fun allowed!"
This was one of the reasons why I "rebelled" and stuck to Old Formats for a while (meaning "I literally created the largest level pack in existence for the 'outdated' version 10.13"
), because I simply did not see myself represented in any way by the early New-Formats version, nor by the philosophy it had been created upon.
This was before the introduction of the Shimmier, you need to know - so basically, early New Formats did nothing that late Old Formats couldn't do; in fact, it did
less (no Radiation, Slowfreeze, or Anti-Splat Pads). In exchange for a couple more new exclusive tilesets. I always knew I would transition to New Formats at the latest once the Shimmier was introduced. We also got Neutral lemmings, limited-number hatches and exits and many more nice things in the meantime.
But of course, eventually, peer pressure was also a factor, as you are experiencing it now, that made me switch to New Formats for good. And by peer pressure, I don't mean "threats of being ostracized" or similar
, but simply "fewer people playing my packs". At some point, I was convinced nobody was playing Old-Formats Lemmings World Tour (except for the Groupie rank, which sparked quite some interest, as I had hoped for
). People were happily watching Arty play it, because, well's, he's just so entertaining to watch doing that
. But I didn't really receive a lot of replays from anyone else until I converted the pack to New Formats, thus incentivising IchoTolot to give it a try.
Eventually, namida took over NeoLemmix development again, and for example brought back the anti-splat pads that Nepster had removed. This was a very welcome and positive move for me, because until then, people had always assured me that anything that had been removed once was unlikely to be brought back ever again.This anticipation of losing everything that got removed for good was also one of the reasons why many of us fought against the Culling Frenzy as hard as we did.
At first, many people were apathetic and indifferent to culls as long as they affected features they had never used themselves (like Slowfreeze, for example). But of course, the more features were supposed to go on the chopping block, the more this piled up, like a snowball effect.
I hope Nepster's inactivity in the forum has nothing to do with the resistance some of us (including myself) presented to him back then, because again, as has been established by other users in this thread as well, this was never about personal attacks - just about not wanting to lose so many of our "toys" at once.
And it's a difference whether somebody says "let's put this toy in the closet for a while because nobody is playing with it, and it does more harm than good" (=cull with the option of re-adding it later), vs. "let's throw this toy in the trash compactor forever, and even if some people are currently still playing with it,
I don't care."
But enough of that history - I also want to address your current level-design philosophy. And it's probably easiest to do so in comparison to mine in my early days, because, as Proxima has pointed out, some of the arguments you are putting forth now are the same I used back then.
And no, even though I certainly evolved as a player and level designer, I haven't completely discarded the "What was fine in original lemmings should be fine in NeoLemmix" mentality that WillLem holds
. So I'm by no means his "enemy" here.
And OK, I can live with that viewpoint - but I don't agree. Sometimes hidden objects can be a fun, exciting and novel way to spice up a game; as long they aren't used excessively and they're carefully referred to by the title, or by the level's design.
One general principle that I see coming up again and again when it comes to any type of content creator - be it Lemmings levels, music, videos on YouTube etc. - is the statement: "Make content that you yourself would enjoy to consume."
Now, you might say "Well, duh, the levels I make are precisely the type of content I enjoy, that's why I'm desiging them this way!"
But with Lemmings levels, it's a special case because there is a solution to be discovered - a solution that is known to you, the level designer, but unknown to the player.
Hence, enjoying something as a level designer, even when playtesting your own level, is not actually the same thing as enjoying it as a player.I know you have good old NeoLemmix 1.43 installed, since you've played a bit of my pack "Lemmicks".
I suggest you go to the "Levels for v10 or older" subforum and scroll back quite a few pages until you find GigaLems. This is also just for 1.43 (doesn't actually run even in 10.13, the latest Old-Formats version). Meaning, you won't have Clear Physics Mode. But you will have a bunch of hidden traps and other troll design choices, such as the Marble exit being covered by bricks, which you also used yourself on some of your levels.
Just give it a try and see for yourself how you enjoy it when somebody else is doing this to you in a level for which you don't know the solution. And if you do enjoy it in the context of this specific pack, go on to ask yourself what it would look like if more packs were actually designed like this.
Again, not meant to throw shade at GigaLem - this particular pack just happens to be the one that you made famous in that one SEB Lems episode with Arty, in which you mentioned that you managed to make IchoTolot ragequit.
Now, obviously, I have created my fair share of "misleading" levels as well. Mostly in my first pack, Paralems.
I think I have outlined in the appropriate thread how your first pack was both better and worse than my first one:
On the one hand, you managed to create much more challenging puzzles than I did back in the day - many of the levels in Paralems that I consider "bad" now aren't bad because they're unfair; they're simply way too easy for anyone who has been playing NeoLemmix for a while. Because they were designed to be more like original Lemmings, and as Proxima has pointed out, those levels usually gave you far too many skills to be conceptually challenging - the challenge arose from the execution, if at all.
On the other hand, you took the misleading elements, as well as the execution difficulty, to way greater extremes in your first pack than I did.Basically, Paralems was "misleading" in the sense that it broke with some conventions regarding hidden objects. But it established its own rules to go by instead; it didn't just pull a random surprise to trick the player. Basically, those rules could be summarised as:
-
Any animal you see in Paralems is hungry for Lemmings. This is epitomised in the penultimate level, "IT'S FEEDING TIME!" Whether it's a trap to begin with, like the Rock Chameleon, or whether it's actually terrain, like the L2 Highland Nessy, you can be damn sure it's going to eat your lemmings in the context of this pack. Once you know this - and I clearly stated it in the thread where I uploaded the pack - none of these animal traps should be considered "hidden traps" any longer. (I do remember one genuinely hidden trap in the third-to-last level "Dark fate of Atlantis", but I think that was already the worst offender.)
-
Most hidden exits had their position implied by flavour and context. For example, there was a Medieval level where the exit was hidden behind the castle gate terrain, then there was a Space level where it was hidden inside the UFO at the opposite end of the level.
- Admittedly, when I used tilesets that featured traps that had been deliberately designed to be difficult to identify as traps - like the Retractable Boulder trap from the Dirt tileset, or the falling leaves from namida's Tree tileset - I didn't go out of my way to make those traps more visible. Because that was usually only possible by making them stick out like a sore thumb (e.g. not connected to any body of terrain at all). I have always put aesthetics over strict game fairness in that regard, and thus, I basically put the blame for these "invisible" traps on the designer of the graphic set, who had created these deliberately hard-to-see traps in the first place.
-
There was one troll level towards the end of the pack that was clearly labelled as such. It's called "Trust No 1" and it even has a pre-level-text disclaimer that tells the player that nothing on this level is as it seems. Thus, even this doesn't come out of nowhere.
- Then there's the level "Break My Fall" from the Demented rank in Paralems.
This level has a splat pad right under the hatch, and an anti-splat pad hidden in the terrain right below. A single Bomber is enough to uncover it, and there isn't much other stuff you can try in this level, because it's right at the beginning. Still, this is genuinely hidden information. I simply didn't know back then how else to do it, and the anti-splat pad actually had to be in the ground in order to be uncovered by the Bomber first.
I explained this to Nepster, and he actually complimented me on that level and said something along the lines of, "Yes, I know, sometimes a bit of unfairness is unavoidable."
So funnily enough, it seems like even none of the experienced forum members remembered that I could simply untick the "no-overwrite" box for that anti-splat pad, so that it would get displayed in front of the terrain it was buried in, i.e. visible.
I only discovered this for myself when creating my next pack, Pit Lems - and consequently used it "fairly" on the levels "The long way down / Controlled overload".
Since Paralems is Old-Formats only and therefore probably no one is playing it anymore, I haven't actually gone back to make that anti-splat pad visible on the level "Break my fall". But I am going to make this level part of Pit Lems remastered, i.e. the extended, New-Formats version of Pit Lems. And that version, of course, is going to feature such a visible anti-splad pad inside the terrain.
Most of the objects hidden in Paralems, and even still in Lemmings World Tour to some extent (hello octopus!
) were hidden for aesthetic reasons, not to "subvert player expectations". (I'm deliberately using that term to showcase how you're basically pulling a Last Jedi on the player if you go for too many of those nasty surprises
). I established that the player would have to resort to flavour-based common sense ("Animals can eat lemmings.") over just strictly mechanics-based knowledge ("L2 Highland Nessy is always terrain, not a trap.") to beat Paralems.
In contrast, I never employed things like e.g. the brick-covered Marble exit. That caught me completely off-guard the first time I saw it in GigaLems.In closing, to the newest post you just wrote:
There are ways to keep these elements in there for those that enjoy them. That's all I'm saying.
Going back to the "supply-and-demand" thing I pointed out in the beginning: Eventually, you will find that the problem is not people trying to persuade you to change your level design - they can't force you, and it's not like the moderators delete packs either that don't conform to the established NeoLemmix design philosophy (that was my initial fear when I was new here!
).
Instead, once you discover that "those that enjoy those elements" are simply very few in number, within a group that's already small in numbers, you might just decide for yourself that actively putting such elements into your packs might simply not be worth your time and effort. I remember for example how you told us how much time you spent on placing all the hatches on your level "You have to be kidding me!" exactly right for your intended pixel-precision solution. Isn't it a shame that you put in all of this effort, just for most people who see the level to go "nah, I'll skip that one" at first sight?
Sure, for that you could accuse them of being "lazy" and giving up to easily. But that would be like Disney complaining that Star Wars fans are no longer willing to show up in the same numbers as they used to in order to pay for a product that is only Star Wars in the name by now, but doesn't offer the content they expect under that name. It's like that old "New Coke replacing Coca Cola" story: When you target the NeoLemmix audience, they will expect and go for NeoLemmix-philosophy content, and leave the rest on the table.
Just like they can't force you to change your design philosophy, you ultimately can't force them to play your levels, even though it's obvious to everyone how much effort you put into every single one of them.
TL;DR: I have repeatedly called myself the "libertarian voice" here on the forums, meaning I objected to those few measures I considered "authoritarian" (like features getting culled, or people e.g. locking the thread for level packs in Old Formats so that no new content for Old Formats could be posted - this was quickly reversed after my complaint, though
). Instead I always argued that the "free market of ideas" would solve these issues.
And as I predicted, this basically boils down to: You should always be allowed to make unpopular design choices, but it will simply result in fewer people playing your packs.
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Topic: Hidden/invisible objects: OK? Or not OK? (Read 7511 times)