[RetroLemmini] ROTL III: Lemmings Assemble - A new community collaboration pack!

[mobius]

Just to quickly add; in case I didn't mention this before; every time I produced an update; my biggest concern was taking in everyone's feedback. "a level=incompatible with NL (or visa versa) wasn't the only reason levels got removed or altered. Obviously every single piece of feedback isn't available in the threads, but some of it should be. At one point Akseli and Pieuw made entire google docs with feedback on every single level. And there's opinions by those who LP'd the games like kaywhyn. Again, its not my call anymore, but imho these opinions should be taken into account. Atm, i don't know where to find those docs, I'll try looking if anyone wants.
I bring this up because the Lemmini version is older and therefore contains levels removed from later versions, like 'Oh no, not again', for example because only 1 person I remember liked it; everyone else that voiced an opinion pretty much hated that level.

Another important thing is backroute fixes and polishes and that sort of thing. I haven't looked at these recent updates of the Lemmini version (and frankly don't intend to) but I wonder if older problems and mistakes in those were brought back here.

Anyways; no intents to be a downer or anything; I fully support whatever you guys do with this. If we start a new pack (sequel or whatever) I'd recommend making a new topic for that, inviting people to post levels and go through a playtesting period, like we did with the lix community set. That was tons of fun honestly, I hope we can do that again, even if my involvement is minimal.

[WillLem]

taking over the RotL project and moving it back to RL
...
The only way that I can see this working is if those who are interested ... work together to agree on the level selection (and then ordering, backroute fixes etc), with the aim of producing final RL and NL versions with the same levels

Agreed, absolutely. Both versions should be as identical as possible. We all need to co-ordinate.

If it helps, I'm actually not too fussed about level selection/ordering, or backroute fixing. I'm happy for others to take that on.

The thing I feel strongest about is the amount of levels, the pack titles, the music (there's currently way too much), and the overall presentation.

Here's what I'd suggest:

Revenge of the Lemmings (120 levels)
Picnic / Hootenanny / Carnage / Armageddon

Return of the Lemmings (120 levels)
Kind / Cunning / Devious / Menacing

Lemmings Assemble (120 levels)
Breezy / Clever / Perplexing / Ridiculous

[Proxima]

The thing I feel strongest about is the amount of levels, the pack titles, the music (there's currently way too much), and the overall presentation.

Good to know, and fortunately I agree with the proposed pack titles, number of levels, and about the music.

As for me, the things I feel most strongly about are:
* Avoiding miles-out-of-place howlers like "Crossing Paths" being in the first rank
* Keeping the focus either on NeoLemmix, or on NL and RL equally
* Working together on level selection so we can come up with a final version we're all satisfied with, and we won't have to have the same discussion and yet another version five years down the line 

[WillLem]

* Avoiding miles-out-of-place howlers like "Crossing Paths" being in the first rank
* Keeping the focus either on NeoLemmix, or on NL and RL equally
* Working together on level selection so we can come up with a final version we're all satisfied with, and we won't have to have the same discussion and yet another version five years down the line 

Agreed on all points. I think it probably makes sense to keep the focus on NL (since that's the most popular engine), and then cross-port the resulting pack to RL.

As for porting to RL, the process will be generally this:

1) Is the level playable in RL without changing anything? If yes, add it. If no, move to (2)
2) Is the level playable in RL by making a small change to the level layout or release rate? If yes, make the change and add it. If no, move to (3)
3) Is the level playable in RL by making a small change to the skillset, lem count, or time limit? If yes, make the change and add it. If no, move to (4)
4) Is the level playable in RL by making a large change to anything? If yes, make the change and add it. If no, move to (5)
5) Find a suitable replacement level in the reserve pool and add it

It should be understood that replacement levels would be added at the same listing slot as the level being replaced, in order to preserve the ordering.

[Proxima]

I know we haven't absolutely decided on 3 packs x 4 ranks yet, but I wanted to put down some thoughts on rank names before they leave my head. Firstly, an important resource: Akseli's list of rank names in other packs. We don't absolutely have to avoid duplication, but it's one factor to consider; we should definitely avoid duplicating a name already used twice, like "Breezy" or "Perplexing".

The existing RotL ranks have some individually good names, but they don't cohere all that well as a series: there's a mixture of nouns and adjectives, and no consistent theme; "Picnic" and "Hootenanny" start a "social gatherings" theme, which is then dropped. "Pain" coming after "Frenzy" feels the wrong way round.

I guess that the intention is for pack 2 to be overall harder than pack 1 but not to the extent of pack 1 containing the easiest 120 levels and pack 2 the hardest 120; so the difficulty order of the ranks might be 1A, 2A, 1B, 2B, 1C, 2C, 1D, 2D; the rank names should at least roughly reflect this (which means 2D should be "Armageddon").

Of WillLem's suggestions (above), "Kind" and "Clever" are non-duplicates.

My suggestions:

Pack 1: Picnic, Hootenanny, Riot, Carnage
Pack 2: ?, Pain, Frenzy, Armageddon
Pack 3: Kind, Devious, Menacing, Absurd

"?" obviously isn't a suggestion, it's a blank to fill in later    "Absurd" is inspired by WillLem's "Ridiculous", but changed to a synonym to avoid a duplicate.

[Proxima]

I've attached a spreadsheet with the titles, authors and styles of all 240 levels in the latest NeoLemmix version. Next, I'm going to go through the level list (which WillLem has provided) for the RL version and compare the two, so that we know how many levels we have in total; that will help when it comes to time to start the selection process.

Since we want to keep the NL and RL versions synchronised, I've highlighted levels that use styles that don't exist (currently) in RL. Fortunately, there are only seven of these: three in L2 Circus, one in L2 Medieval, one in Persia and two (a repeat pair) in Minesweeper. (At some point there was discussion about having one "special graphics" level per rank and treating the Persia and Minesweeper levels as this, but that never got off the ground. Of course, we can still keep these levels even if we don't have others.)

[WillLem]

Pack 1: Picnic, Hootenanny, Riot, Carnage

This works well to continue the "social gathering" theme, nice.

Pack 2: ?, Pain, Frenzy, Armageddon

This group I'm less sure about. There doesn't appear to be a common theme between them.

'Frenzy' and 'Armaggedon' could work well together I suppose, I'd suggest 'Calm' and 'Ruckus' as leading ratings for these.

So: Calm / Ruckus / Frenzy / Armaggeddon

Side note: 'Frenzy' and 'Carnage' are interchangeable here IMO. We could have:

Picnic / Hootenanny / Riot / Frenzy

and:

Calm / Ruckus / Carnage / Armaggeddon

But honestly, the other orderings work just as well.

Pack 3: Kind, Devious, Menacing, Absurd

'Absurd' definitely doesn't fit here. The leading theme appears to be "character traits", which is why I went with 'Cunning' between 'Kind' and 'Devious'.

Honestly, I think my original suggestion is better here:

Kind / Cunning / Devious / Menacing

If you don't like 'Menacing' as a final rating, here are some other suggestions:

Relentless
Intense
Savage
Brutal

All of these fit with the "character traits" theme.

[Proxima]

More thoughts on rank names in a bit  Firstly, here's the spreadsheet updated with all levels from RotL version 2. (The current RL version is based on this, but there are slight differences; I'll check with WillLem to see whether these are actual differences in level selection, or just levels being retitled.)

I've done my best to indicate exactly which levels are common to the two versions -- this task is complicated by some levels being retitled, and sometimes being given a title that belongs to a different level in the other version!

In any case, here are the important statistics:

Version 4 has 240 levels, 67 unique and 173 in common with version 2.
Version 2 has 270 levels, 97 unique.
Therefore, in total there are 337 levels between these two versions.
(We can regard the 173 shared levels as the core of the pack; all these will be kept unless there is a really strong reason for dropping any of them.)

The levels unique to version 2 mostly fall into two categories: easy repeats of later levels; and levels by Martin Zurlinden, Clam Spammer and Insane Steve (which were removed from version 4 because these levels are available in MazuLems, Clammings and Insane Steve's World in NeoLemmix). I think WillLem is leaning towards leaving these levels out; certainly, if we want to reduce the pack to two packs of 120 each, 337 levels is a lot to work from, and cutting these out makes the task easier!