Feedback on a new style?

[hrb264]

Hi everyone,

I've been working on a new style based around Judaism and Jewish holidays but I thought it would be pretty fun to play and maybe a new way of getting some people from my community into playing lemmings. However, it's the first time I've ever tried something like this, and the results have been pretty mixed so far I think.

It'd be really good if people could take a look at the style I've created and some of the levels I've made with it (I've put them into a pack, but I'm intending to make more) and give me some feedback as to what else I could include and how to make things better. I was thinking of making a couple of other tilesets based around particular holidays such as Passover and Hanukkah. Let me know what you think

[WillLem]

Hi hrb264, thanks for taking the time to create this new style and level pack for RetroLemmini! It's great to see some creativity and personality in these levels, and you've done well to bake in a consistent theme throughout - pun very much intended!

The levels themselves are fun to play and showcase the Jewish theme well with clever titles and interesting layouts. The levels are not as easy as they look at first, and present a challenge similar to that of the "Tricky" levels in that they provide plenty of skills but also plenty of obstacles and irregular terrain to work your way around. Nice work!

As for the style, it's very inspired, very colourful, and certainly decent enough for a first effort at creating a style, which is a very difficult thing to master. I like the background color and the fact that the builder bricks are red - this is good attention to detail and really helps it to feel like its own thing.

I do have some suggestions that would improve things a bit:

You could try making all of the pieces half the size they are now. You wouldn't lose any detail at that resolution, and you'd probably find that the pieces would become a bit more versatile as well.

The objects need a fair bit of work. There are some inventive ideas for traps that fit the theme very well, but I'd definitely suggest resizing these so that they're a bit more lemming-sized and can therefore have a more appropriate trigger area. Also, the animation frames need to all be exactly the same size and offset relative to one another to keep the animation smooth and consistent. I'll happily take a look at these with you at some point - creating animated objects is no easy task!

Also, the 'metal' style is required to play a couple of the levels. You mentioned that since you're only using one piece you might add it to 'shalom' and maybe recolour it to fit your theme even more - I'd say that's definitely a good move.

Other than that, this is a very good first set of levels and style pieces. Keep up the good work!


I've taken the liberty of re-uploading the levels and style with the style re-named to 'shalom' instead of 'shalomx', since RetroLemmini 4.0 and Editor 2.0 can now play nicely with style names that end in 'om'. The objects also needed a tiny bit of empty space cropping off the bottom so that their height is divisible exactly by the specified number of frames - this has also been done for you. The animations themselves and positions in the level remain identical.

I'll be happy to help you develop your style further if you wish.

[hrb264]

Thanks so much for taking a look! I thought I had changed all the levels that required the 'metal' objects so they included the objects that were provided, but will take a look at that again thanks