[DISC][PLAYER] The final new skill

[namida]

And there are 8 pure movement: 5 permanent, plus walker, jumper, shimmier. More than enough.

Two of these I'd question if they really count as "pure movement". The Disarmer alters the level, albeit altering gadgets rather than terrain. The Walker can be used for pure movement, but just as significant is the use to cancel a terrain altering skill - essentially, altering the alteration itself. (Jumper and Shimmier can also be used for this, but in those cases, it's less of a primary function and more of a side effect that can be abused - in a non-negative sense - by creators and/or players.)

[Simon]

Agree that disarmer is not movement, will fix in long post (3 above).

Walker, I'd fully consider it movement. The cancelling is not unique to him, thus I'll ignore the cancelling for his categorization, and what comes after the cancelling is only movement.

I think I wrote a rant on the walker once, in how it decides at all whether to turn (same rules in all of L3, NL, Lix) but can't be fixed to always-turn or never-turn because it's too ingrained in levels already. (For the record, Proxima disagreed that the decision is a problem.) Clones gave unlimited walkers in every level, and walker assignments only cancelled, never turned.

-- Simon

[Proxima]

Discussion of the Lix walker

[WillLem]

By contrast, the poster of a fresh design must expect, at worst, complete rejection of an idea that they spent time on.
[/li][/list]

Yep: I experience this quite a lot! It's the Continuing Conundrum of the Ideas Man: stay quiet, or risk rejection. It's always worth putting ideas forward if you have them though; just be sure to remember that other people will likely not see things the way you do, and also that the least popular types of idea are innovative ones, and silly ones.

Only when a design, really the design alone, convinces the reader by its own strength, then one has an argument.

I agree with this. However, I'm not sure how this argument necessarily strengthens the case for terrain-mod skills alone and not movement skills; the Walker, Cloner and Shimmier are all examples of excellent design - simple, elegant, useful skills all, prone though they may be to unintended use.

the jetboarder... it's at its heart the spear thrower with fixed angle, the simplemost angle really, and movement of the asignee along with the spear. Thus, the jetboarder's complexity is similar to most other recent inventions.

Agreed. It does seem to satisfy a lot of people's wishes for the new skill. It's between this and the Slider for me, unless an even better idea comes along in the meantime.

If a skill is assignable to a lemming on even ground, and the resulting animation gives a good hint on what the skill might do, that's good... The least-discoverable skill in L1 is probably the basher, but even the basher is swinging at the air for a full stroke.

I'd have thought that the Climber and Floater would have been the least discoverable via their animations alone, since they do nothing at all upon assignment. NL recolours athletes, which gives some indication that their state has changed, but original versions of the game gave no indication at all that anything is different.

However, since it features the tutorial levels at the start of the game, this ensures discoverability of each skill in a safe, intuitive environment via experimentation: no instructions; just choose the skill, assign it to the lemming and see what happens. This is the best kind of discovery for a player.

That said, I agree that discoverability in the sense you describe is important: the more obvious a skill's function is, the more likely a player is to learn to use it and rely on it.

[Simon]

I'd have thought that the Climber and Floater would have been the least discoverable

Right. It's indeed mitigated by the near-mandatory tutorial levels. If you don't assign Floater, you lose, if you assign at least one Floater, doesn't matter where, you win.

In NL, the tutorial pack is much more reference than intoduction. It's an extra reason to keep discoverability in mind.

Discussion of the Lix walker

Thanks!


I feel like I have ranted too hard against pure movement in reply #193. I should refine that. It's really enough material for a separate post on design.

Gist: Given lots of terrain modifiers, we collect opportunity for a couple pure movement to thrive in the tunnels/bridges that the terrain modifiers create (climber, shimmier). But too much pure movement goes against the indirect control fundamental idea. So it's really about a balance between skill categories, but not 50:50, that's too much movement for my taste. (It's also not just 2 categories anyway.)

Also movement permanents tend to accrue quadratic complexity (because they override behavior), most other skills increase the game complexity only linearly.

Thus my opinion of the slider is again, yeah, very nice, but opportunity costs are too high in NL given the current skill mix, given that only 1 skill shall be added. I really have no idea what one skill I'd pick. I feel that several will happen.

Thanks for the inspiration from this entire thread. I have the burning desire to cut skills from Lix and add more interesting stuff. Well, until the dust of reality settles in form of broken coverage that I'd rather not inflict.

-- Simon

[namida]

New poll is up.

Tunneller / straight-up laser blaser are not on there. My reasoning: having a long-range, instant destructive skill is more interesting than another slow one. Likewise, the angled laser-blaster sounds like it would have far more use than the non-angled one.

For the avoidance of doubt, this poll will not be the final determiner of which skill is chosen. It's more just to see if any of the strong contenders has significantly less interest than the others.

[WillLem]

For the avoidance of doubt, this poll will not be the final determiner of which skill is chosen. It's more just to see if any of the strong contenders has significantly less interest than the others.

That being the case, is it OK to allow people more than 1 vote?

[namida]

Ideally I'd have liked to do this as a "distribute points" thing (ie: voters have perhaps 10 points, and can distribute them however they want) or a single-transferrable-vote system, but SMF's polls aren't that fancy. At any rate, while some options do have more votes than others, going by the overall distribution I don't think we can fairly say any option - even the one with the least votes here - can be ruled out at this point.

[namida]

I'd also like to clarify here that I'm willing to do two of the skills under consideration only if it's specifically the projectile constructive + projectile destructive combo. The reason for this is that the majority of the code could be shared between the two, as the only differences are visual appearances and "what happens when it hits terrain?"

This doesn't mean for sure that if we look at these, both will make it in. It could still happen that we only get one or the other, if the other doesn't hold up as useful enough. It just means I'm willing to consider doing both.

If this does happen, it is possible they might not both come at the same time.

[namida]

Okay so, poll results are looking a bit different from my previous post. In particular, the Jetboarder is significantly lacking behind the others. I happen to know that the person who originally voted for it before actually changed their vote to something else, but a new vote for Jetboarder has come up in the meantime.

Nonetheless, I think we can eliminate that one from consideration.

I'm going to leave this topic open for a little bit longer in case some amazing new idea we haven't thought of yet pops up, but for the most part, it looks like this is going to come down to Slider vs Laser-Blaster vs Projectiles (with the "projectiles" possibly being one destructive + one constructive). While those three do all have different amounts of votes, it's close enough for me to say there's clearly interest in all three, and at this point deciding between them is better done on technical / etc grounds rather than popularity.

[Strato Incendus]

for the most part, it looks like this is going to come down to Slider vs Laser-Blaster vs Projectiles (with the "projectiles" possibly being one destructive + one constructive)

So, it's been about 1.5 months and there haven't been any crazy new ideas for other skill options.

Do you think we can narrow it down to a contest between these three now? Because deciding between just them will be difficult enough:

The kid in me wants to play with the Laser Blaster.
The Magic: The Gathering player in me is always out for value and sees Projectiles (destructive + constructive) as a "2 for 1" .
And the level designer in me (as well as the part that says I should stick to my word) keeps supporting the Slider.

[WillLem]

The kid in me wants to play with the Laser Blaster.
The Magic: The Gathering player in me is always out for value and sees Projectiles (destructive + constructive) as a "2 for 1" .
And the level designer in me (as well as the part that says I should stick to my word) keeps supporting the Slider.

Projectile constructive/destructive is currently my favourite. If the option were there to specify the direction of the projectile (even if just vertically or horizontally), there would be no contest.

As it is, the other two are a close joint second. I'd probably need to have the potential uses of the Laser Blaster explained to me either in picture or list format to get fully behind it, and the Slider has slightly diminished due to its dependence on other skills to be fully usable (for instance, Slider>Jumper would have to be possible for it to be a worthwhile skill).

[ericderkovits]

how about the final new skill be a lemming that can reveal hidden elements such as stacked elements (ie hatches).
Haha just kidding. I would like to see a downward diagonal builder since we have an upward diagonal one and a horizontal one(platformer). there have been times I wanted one availaible when trying to make my version of Angry Lemming(which currently stands at taxing 25-been busy doing other things but will soon continue this)

But whatever new skill comes I'll be happy as I think one can make levels using it.

also I really don't like glitches in levels since they are hard to solve(I know there were some in Dovelems-ie Maso 30) and when I converted the Lemmini one to Superlemmini I had to playtest some(Those ones were difficult to get replays on)

[Dullstar]

Some of the discussion makes me kind of opposed to the idea of having it be the final new skill. The surviving three could all arguably be good ideas, but one must be chosen and the others discarded.

I'd say take Slider and Laser Blaster, at least. If I had to choose, Slider fits my level design tendencies much better than Laser Blaster (it's basically a ranged fencer, and in practice I haven't gotten much use out of the fencer and the Laser Blaster's range will only help a little), but it's not like the Laser Blaster is useless and I'm not really sure I want to have a "fight to the death" between the two proposals.

If I were to rule one of the ideas out, I'd rule out the projectile skills. For every other skill, the skill shadows and sketches are an assist feature, but I think the projectile arc would make the skill shadows and sketches a must have for using it. That doesn't mean they're a bad idea that doesn't deserve to be implemented in the game, but if we can't have them all...

[WillLem]

how about the final new skill be a lemming that can reveal hidden elements such as stacked elements (ie hatches). Haha just kidding.

Haha! I think that's the first joke I've seen you crack, I thought you were being serious at first

I would like to see a downward diagonal builder since we have an upward diagonal one and a horizontal one(platformer).

I think this idea's already been ruled out... platformers and well-placed terrain can achieve the same thing from a design point of view, but I agree it would make existing levels very interesting for remix/challenge purposes.

there have been times I wanted one availaible when trying to make my version of Angry Lemming

Angry Lemming?

Some of the discussion makes me kind of opposed to the idea of having it be the final new skill. The surviving three could all arguably be good ideas, but one must be chosen and the others discarded.

Agreed. Although to be fair, my favourite idea has both already been ruled out long ago so whatever gets chosen out of the remaining lot, I'll be happy enough.

If I were to rule one of the ideas out, I'd rule out the projectile skills. For every other skill, the skill shadows and sketches are an assist feature, but I think the projectile arc would make the skill shadows and sketches a must have for using it.

Hmm... good shout. The projectiles were initially my favourite of the three, but this has made me re-think. I think having the option to turn off skill shadows (which I believe is definitely happening now) would mean that players could get used to using the skills "classic style" to get an idea of the range and be able to judge it more or less accurately without the use of the shadows, then perhaps be less reliant on the shadows when they are enabled.