Thanks for your comment Dullstar. I've thought about going "full retro" with it, but tbh that would actually be way more work than you'd think for very little (if any) gain. NeoLemmix's coding is already so far down the "modern" route than it would mean stripping out enormous chunks of code and basically just ending up with "Lemmix, but a bit better" which doesn't seem worth my time and effort tbh.
I think maybe I've conveyed the wrong idea about what I'm going for here, so I'll clarify.
I'd have to question if it makes sense to appease both crowds with this engine
I'd say it definitely does. I don't want to alienate half of the possible user base for the sake of a few controversial features.
Far better to allow the player more customisability over their own personal experience (
which is what this engine is really about, beneath the ostensible "Classic" or "Retro" aesthetics.) I'd like the player to be able to cherry pick which of the assists they'd like and tailor it to their own preferences, or simply hit the "Classic Mode" button, which will automatically disable everything but the bare basics.
Perhaps fully embrace this engine's difference in philosophy and then design a cohesive experience around that
Like I said, the philosophy is less about forcing players to play a certain way and more about giving them the choice. It seems a waste of time to make what will essentially just be another Lemmini. We all know that this engine is highly unpopular. It's always been my belief that the best and most-used engine on the Forums should offer the player as many options as possible, rather than enforce any sort of "player philosophy".
If anything,
SuperLemmix is about doing away with that type of thing altogether, in a perhaps wayward but valiant attempt to cater to everyone.
With that said, I'll definitely take on board your comments regarding the features themselves, in particular:
As part of this, rather than allowing levels to disable player assist features, I think it would be better for you to decide which player assist features this engine should keep.
It will keep all of them, and give the player the choice of which ones they want to use. NeoLemmix already does this to some extent anyway via its hotkey system, SuperLemmix will just make it a bit more overt by making these features toggleable only in the Options menu. (So rather than it being a case of "just don't like it if you don't use it", a player won't just end up toggling it back on mid-game anyway - they'll commit to an experience and go with it).
In addition, I recommend keeping Clear Physics Mode just because let's be honest hidden objects suck and it doesn't actually make fair levels easier
If I
was going to go down the route of making this a "full Retro" engine, CPM would be the first thing to go!
As it is, I'll probably be keeping this as a panel button
if I can figure out how to make the small circular buttons as seen in the panel mockup. It is a good anti-troll feature, after all.
Though I do hope you at least keep pausing with a hotkey even if you don't keep assign while paused.
Yes, of course. I'll map it to "P" by default since that makes most sense, but of course players will still be able to customise their own hotkeys. Assign-whilst-paused will be toggleable via the Options menu for players that like the challenge.
I likely wouldn't go with "Force Classic Mode" unless level designers wanted it. It's my thinking that most players on here wouldn't like that, so it's probably not something I'll spend too much time pursuing.
Why disable auto screen start?
I meant disable it by default, not remove it altogether. I'd rather have to click it for it to set the start rather than forget that it's been auto-set in the wrong (or a less-than-ideal) place. Maybe it should be a user-side option ("Prefer auto-start" or something like that).
