Design an all-or-nothing map where the winner will ususally have many more lix saved than second place.
Is there any examples of a level which already exists which follows this rule rather well. I find this hard to picture myself.
For some reason geoo's map "Selective Rescue" comes to mind because you either save most of your Lix's or barely any.
Maybe a better way to put this "all or nothing" idea would be to say that in most games you'd save either almost no lemmings or
close to the full amount of lemmings you start with (or even more if you steal).
Maps where you bunch your crowd are likely to fit in this category.
Selective Rescue would be a good example I'd say, or
Stepping
Stones,
Pancake compression,
Downward reduction, maps like that.
Make an asymmetric map that still yields balanced results. (Between stronger players?)
This would need throughout testing even before submitting.
Maybe a better way to put it would be:
Make an asymmetric map where no player seems to have an obvious advantage.
Would this be in spirit of Flopsy's suggestion
Create a level which has no symmetry and the entrances and exits are inconsistent (definition could be worded better).
or do you deliberately also want to cater for unfair maps?
I would suggest another rule like this one: Make a map where your path to the exit crosses with exactly/at least/no more than X players.
And you'd fix an X and a comparator to get a specific rule for the contest?
But doesn't that number depend the path that you (and each other player) chooses (and I assume "share a segment with" would qualify as "crossing" a path)? For example,
Vertigo or
Along the Fabrics of your clothing make players share segments of their path rather than crossing, so I think that should count. And for the latter, if everyone goes up, there is no crossing, but if everyone goes down, everyone shares a path with everyone else basically, so I'm not sure what X would be for this level.
Nessy also suggested to me that a one of each skill level like "Cowabunga on a Beam" by Arty.
Yeah, levels with low skill counts might deserve some more exploration. Nothing I've tried so far or have seen has really worked out too well, but maybe it's worth revisiting.
I think in general, considering this is especially for getting some novel maps of types we're short of or lacking, I'd say the rules should serve more for inspiration than categorizing.
So if a rule doesn't allow you to make a 100% certain call for each level whether it belongs or not, that's probably fine, as long as level authors follow them in spirit (even if maybe the level turns out a bit different than intended). In particular, I think it's good if the rules prompt authors to think about certain aspects of a level, and try to imaging how a level plays out:
From my experience, if you take a bunch of terrain pieces and slap together a nicely symmetric map with a generous generic skill set and everyone having their path to the exit (that may overlap), often these maps end up giving way to very similar gameplay where you build a route and then defend it from other players while your lixes stream to the exit. Depending on how and how much the routes overlap, this might even end up somewhat tedious if you get a constant back and forth of someone breaking your route and you fixing it again. Starting out with "what do I want to achieve", imagining the gameplay and building to achieve it yields larger variety I'd say. Some of the resulting maps might be utter garbage if they don't turn out as intended (I have a dumpster full of those, though sometimes they can be salvaged), but you also get the really good ones like this, so I think it's good to promote such a more analytical approach for the contest.
I'd also allow for multiple submissions per category (not sure about submitting one level to multiple categories if it fits), to encourage more content.
I guess there could be a vote-off for each category, and an overall one, as usual?