Btw, one question:
Can a lemming land on the spear as it's flying through the air?For example, you throw a spear through the path of some Faller to break its fall (by turning him into a Walker for like 1-2 frames), and then the spear travels on to land somewhere else.
I'm not saying this is a level anyone should make - most likely, you should NOT
- I just want to know whether it's theoretically possible. Or whether the spear only "becomes" terrain after having landed somewhere.
b) there are thin pieces of one-way arrows that the Grenader can simply ignore
Ah! Music to my ears!
Are you really sure about a skill flat-out ignoring one-way arrows being a good thing? It's already enough of a constant issue with Diggers, because it has been esablished by the original game that they can go through horizontal one-way arrows (which was all the original game had anyway). You can make a wall Miner-proof without it being Digger-proof if you install horizontal one-way arrows pointing in the opposite direction than the one the Miner would be facing. But you can't do the opposite, i.e. making a wall Digger-proof without making it Miner-proof as well. The only type of one-way arrow that can stop a Digger are upward ones, and those can only be overcome by Fencers right now (and Laserers soon).
Bombers can ignore all types of one-way arrows, which is their distinct power, but they do so at two very considerable costs:
a) the loss of a lemming
b) the very small size of the area of terrain destroyed
The Grenader destroys more terrain than the Bomber, has range, AND is not lethal. In many contexts, it will thus be flat-out superior to the Bomber.To be clear, this is not me putting the Grenader under general suspicion of causing backroutes, or advocating against its introduction. I still very much enjoy the skill. But calling the fact that it can so easily ignore any type of one-way arrows an improvement to the game as a whole, especially because it supposedly adds "unpredictability", is quite baffling to me.
If you say this...
That's more like it. Level designers shouldn't worry about including any skill - they should simply design the level so that it can't be used in an undesirable way (should they wish to backroute-proof the level, that is).
...you do realise that one-way arrows are one of the primary ways to accomplish precisely what you expect every level designer to be capable of, i.e. backroute fixing? And that therefore, a skill removing large chunks of terrain without caring about any one-way arrows at all poses inherent and completely new problems?
For me, the Grenadier feels like something of a blast of fresh air that the game sorely needs: its unpredictable nature offers much-needed counterpoint to the many fiddly, finnicky uses for most of the other destructive and constructive skills.
I don't see what's "unpredictable" about the Grenader at all. It's one of the two skills that has a skill shadow already now in experimental testing, so that actually makes it more predictable than the Laserer currently is.
And finally, if you say my comments about the Spearer are an argument against its implementation in your book, then I would like to remind you that you praising the Grenader's supposed "unpredictability", if people agree with you on that, would most certainly be a mark
against its implementation for the vast majority of other NeoLemmix players.
Because unpredictability, as I've outlined to you repeatedly, is the last thing the puzzle enthusiasts would want in the game.
So even if that's your personal opinion, and I can see how the Grenader might indeed "tip the balance away from high-precision solutions", not because of the arc, but because its crater is quite big and also irregularly shaped:
By highlighting this factor of supposed "unpredictability" as an "advantage" of the Grenader, you're still just adding more arguments against its introduction in the court of NeoLemmix public opinion. I'd rather frame it as an argument against pixel precision. Preventing pixel precision is indeed something most NeoLemmix players can probably agree upon. And if the Grenader lends itself well to crafting less pixel-precise solutions (while the Spearer actually
invites more pixel-precise solutions if you have to attach several spears to each other), then
this could be an argument in the Grenader's favour instead.
Speaking of things the projectiles ignore:
What about one-way fields? They only affect lemmings, right? Neither the laser beam, nor the spear, nor the grenade?If you can even straight up throw a grenade through a one-way field, while I could see some fun puzzle applications for that - that would make backroute fixing even harder. Basically, only steel works (pun intended
), and nothing else.