That's not a bad idea!
The reason Dullstar brought that up I think is because it has already been used on a level .
Haha, I know; I made the comment because it's something I did in
Tame Gone Wild - it's the level Proxima is referring to as being "trollish". When I did
TGW I was still in my naughty newbie phase. I'm only just coming out of it, really...
Maybe we can prevent such cases of hatch stacking though by making it easier to modify the limited-number hatches... If all you want to achieve is "I want the 70 lemmings from hatch A to come out first, and then at the end the 10 lemmings from hatch B"... then it would probably be best to have a box you can tick that chooses between "alternating hatches" and "successive hatches".
+1 for this. Super idea!
That would prevent the author needing to stack 20 hatches to get this result, but they would still need to stack two, and they would be doing so for the explicit purpose of deceiving the player. I'm on board with many use cases of stacked hatches being legitimate, but not this.
On the other hand, I can see legitimate puzzle potential in wanting 70 lemmings from hatch A to be released, followed by 10 from hatch B, if A and B are visibly separated -- so there could be discussion about such a feature
Good point. Although I still think the easiest way around this is to have an in-game indicator that the hatches are stacked, or how many there or, or something... it does need discussion, but I generally don't like the idea of not allowing a feature that's a good idea just because it
might be used trollishly. A visual way to represent stacked objects (or indeed a warning system) is all that's needed to circumvent this issue.
However, this is a general problem. One could certainly make the case that each and every hatch should always display the number of remaining lemmings inside, for consistency and visual clarity.
An interesting point: it's
currently possible to stack a limited hatch above a regular hatch, so maybe all hatches should display the number of lems yet to appear. This info could then be removed from the panel in favour of something more useful, perhaps.