[POLL] Is 300 Lemmings too many?

[WillLem]

The question's in the title.

Just to give a few thoughts as to why I sometimes put 300 Lemmings in my levels:

1. I just think it's fun to have loooads of Lemmings. Some levels just look really awesome with loads of them swimming, floating or gliding around; it can be artistically pleasing.

2. Further to this, I like the idea of finding a level solution which involves lots of Lemmings. I have found a couple in my new pack! It's still somewhat arbitrary, but I'm definitely closer to finding a good many-Lemmings level.

3. I like the numbers 3, 30, 33 and 300. And 333!

There are probably better reasons I can't think of right now. Let the discussion ensue! I'd really like to know the reasons why it's generally frowned upon.

[namida]

It's absolutely not something you should do regularly. But it's not a "never do this" either, because there can be situations that call for it. The question to ask yourself is "Do I have a good reason for this?"

A good reason might be that the solution needs that many (perhaps the last lemming needs to do something while falling from the trapdoor, but it's also RR99 so you need a high lemming count to provide enough time - although in this case, in turn consider "does the level need RR99, or would a lower-but-locked RR do the job?"). Or maybe the whole point of the level is that you're dealing with a really, really huge amount of lemmings, and that's where most of the level's feeling / puzzle comes from. To use your reasons as examples - #2 is a good reason, #1 and #3 are not. (On the other hand, 30 or 33 lemmings is a fairly reasonable amount for an average level, so go crazy with 30-lemming or 33-lemming levels.)

[WillLem]

I edited my first reason whilst you were posting, Namida.

Is: "because it looks awesome!" a good reason?

[Proxima]

Recently I played a level that had 500 lemmings, and then was updated to have 800. This is so many that after I had solved the puzzle, it took a while to end the level, even with mashing 10-second skip. Now, I do have a Lix level with 600 lix, but Lix has a minimum spawn interval of 1 (i.e. lix come out every frame, rather than every 4 frames) so in terms of the time it takes for the crowd to exit, it's more like having 150 lemmings.

I agree that there's nothing wrong with having a large number of lemmings if the solution demands it -- in that case there won't be the long wait for everyone to exit at the end.

[ccexplore]

Most people find it boring to watch lemmings walk.  Certainly you can agree that if it's going to take, say, 5 minutes for all the lemmings to exit, then after watching initially for N seconds or minutes, you will still eventually get to a point where you would gain nothing out of watching it longer (after all, it's not going to be any different walking than the first N seconds/minutes you've watched), and so you'd then prefer to skip as quickly as possible to the end (if not, replace 5 minutes with whatever higher number will make the sentence true for you, and then remember that you are not the only player of the game and others may have lower tolerances).  Most of the time the same level probably works with fewer lemmings, so then it makes sense to just use fewer in the level, rather than forcing everyone to waste time waiting (and potentially tons of key presses) to skip past the walking.

You may think that this can be addressed by having a "skip to the end" key that tries to fast forward the game as quickly as the computer can handle.  But even then you will run into a snag in levels where some lemmings may remain alive forever in the level but can never reach the exit.  Normally the player would then end the level by pressing ESC to exit or by nuking.  But it's too hard for the computer to reliably recognize the level has reached a state where no further lemmings can be saved.  The best it can do is maybe to have the program decides to stop fast-forwarding if it detects no new lemmings saved after some amount of time, and then the user can look and decide that yes, the level is really done and they can take actions like exiting or nuking.

And with high enough number of lemmings, even a fast-forward that's not artificially speed-limited will still take noticeable amount of time.

Personally I'm probably more patient than the average here and can probably tolerate a longer wait time, but I can certainly appreciate those who'd prefer to "just get to the end already so I can go play the next level, gosh darn it!".

I can appreciate wanting to set the numbers up so it's special, but to be honest, not sure how many 3 or more digit numbers there are that are universally meaningful.  And even then maybe you can just use a similar 2-digit number instead?  For example, consider that DOS Lemming's "All the 6s" chose to make the total number of Lemmings 66, even though (let's disregard hardware limitations for now) 666 is arguably slightly more accurate of a number to reference.

[WillLem]

I've gone through the levels in my pack again that have 300 Lemmings and considered: is it really necessary? There were 7 such levels, there are now just 3.

Of the four that have had their numbers reduced:

One of the levels has actually been reduced to just 4 Lemmings, and has exactly the same solution taking exactly the same amount of time to complete (in this case, all 300 Lemmings would have spawned before the completion of the level except in the case of someone finding an extremely efficient backroute, which is unlikely in this particular level).

One of the levels is now 30 Lemmings, and has had a backroute fix (thanks, Icho!) and is now a much better level as a result of both changes; I'm not actually sure why I originally wanted 300 in this one. Maybe I'd had one too many rums that evening!

The other two levels I've changed now have 100 each: these are levels that did, as ccexplore has discussed above, take a stupid amount of time for all the lems to exit. It's much more reasonable now in both cases, without taking anything away from the visual impact of the levels in question.

The three I've left, I've done so for these reasons:

One of them just really does look cool with 300 Lemmings floating around whilst you're solving the level. Further to that, it involves a talisman that requires the level be done in a certain amount of time, which means executing the intended solution as efficiently as possible. This one does require keeping your finger on the FF button at the end, but it's worth it!

One of them has a limited number of delay skills and requires the player to delay the worker as long as possible whilst the lems stream out of the exit: if they begin working any sooner, the still-entering lems die. Can't really give away too much more than that without spoiling the solution...

Another has several possible solutions, one of which also requires near-perfect timing for the worker lem to pass under the entrance hatch without disturbing the flow. To be fair, everyone who's playtested this level so far has come up with a completely different solution, and I have so far found at least 3 others. I've decided to leave the lem count at 300 just in case someone stumbles upon that particular solution tho; also, it's another level that is still being solved after the stream has finished, so there's no waiting around for lems at the end.

I'm sure my pack has been significantly improved as a result of this discussion though, and I'll be sure to think even more carefully about my lem amounts in the future!

Just a bit of fun. Here's what the poll screen looked like just before I typed out this post. Look at all those 3s!:

[IchoTolot]

I voted for "It depends on the solution". If the solution doesn't 100% not work with a fewer number of lemmings then go for it. I also have a level with 200+ lemmings with a high RR, which goes for a death mearch effect where more and more lemmings die while marching through the level, but I especially made sure that the lemmings are all out long before they reach the exit and that you don't have to wait minutes for everybody to get home. In fact the level has a timer that reaches 0 when the last lemming of the crowd reaches the exit.

Otherwise the lemming count should be reduced. If your solution does not require a ton of lemmings than reduce it. It is even considered good design to keep the count in the lower areas.
This has not purely gameplay reasons:
A ton of lemmings requires computing power. I know that we had quite a few performance issues reported by some people on levels with: High lem count, huge maps, tons of animating objects. Especially with a high-quality minimap activated.
If not doing it for design reasons I would argue that keeping the performance good for as many people as possible by reducing the lem count where it's unnessesarily high is an important goal to strife for.

[EricLang]

The only delaying factor with 300 lemmings walking around is the graphics, not really the calculations: when implemented a bit clever they are almost instant. With my new exploding sound nuking 300 lemmings was really spectacular :-)