A systematic approach to gimmicks

[Strato Incendus]

While waiting for my brother to finally get the last two PARALEMS levels done before uploading the overauled version, I've been working on two separate pack ideas simulatenously, and one of them tries to take the chaos that gimmicks had become when they were abolished after NeoLemmix 1.43 and put it into a more systematic framework: One specific set of gimmicks always remains constant for a rank, i.e. 10 levels or so, then that rule set is discarded and a new one is introduced for the next rank. Only the final one, "Chaos", will combine all different kinds of gimmicks that were introduced to the player before in a... well, "chaotic" manner .

However, as you might know, there was an awful number of gimmicks . So many that I already moved from a strict "one gimmick per rank"-policy to a "use gimmicks in combination that make sense together" approach (like vertical and horizontal wrap always go together; hardworkers always goes together with permanent blockers and non-lethal bombers, so every skill is "eternal", and so on).

Since afaik one cannot create more than 9 ranks in a pack, I just wanted to ask which gimmicks were considered the community's favourite ones back in the day. Since level wrap was suggested to be reimplemented in the new formats version, I guess that one was among them, as were zombies (which I don't actually consider a gimmick anymore, hence they can appear on all the ranks). But for all the other options, I have no idea how much they were liked by the players or not .

[Simon]

Gimmick rating by individual players

The rising water option had fun side effects: All continuous traps would move upwards, not only water, and leave a trail of destruction behind. We had a joke level with flamethrowers hidden far, far below the map, and set a fast rising speed.

With this much love for gimmicks and highly experimental game design, it's astonishing you've never dabbled in programming.

-- Simon

[namida]

For the record - the limit to the number of ranks is 15, not 9. At one point the limit to the number of levels in a rank was 254, but this might no longer be the case (in which case the limit would either be 999 or practically infinite). This will no longer apply on the new-formats version of NeoLemmix, which will not have any realistic limit to the number of ranks - memory limitations will set in long before any code-related limitation does.