Was: TeleLems

[Strato Incendus]

Edit Simon: mantha16 has unpublished TeleLems and prefers the original publication topic removed. Here are only the replies by others.



One quick general note: When you change the 0 at the end of the dropbox link to a 1, people can download it directly instead of having to open it in Dropbox. This also allows people who don't have a Dropbox account themselves to still download the music pack.

(I also learned that here on the forums for the first time ).

[WillLem]

Downloaded the pack and added it to my LP list. I'm really looking forward to this one!

[WillLem]

Finally had a look at it this morning, here's some feedback. Hope it's useful!

Positives

* It's obvious that a lot of time and effort has gone into this pack. The attention to detail is very good, particularly in the sprite sets and the logo - the Mantha Lem is ace, and the use of colour gradients in the logo and some of the backgrounds (particularly the RoboCop one) is very pleasing
* The Baywatch and Robocop sprites are brilliant
* The Knight Rider set is also fantastic, but just a heads up - it has Magnificent 7 Ascenders and Builders, probably by mistake?
* The theme of the pack is relatable, enjoyable and makes it compelling to play through: players are likely to want to solve those levels that are themed on a favourite show of theirs, which makes it a particularly great idea! Use of the theme music makes this all the more immersive and unique an experience

Possible Improvements

* Some of the sprite sets are unfinished (i.e. missing certain skills) - it's definitely worth spending the time to complete them
* The Superman set is ace, although the Glider in this spriteset should definitely have a suit & cape!
* Some of the levels are backroutable; I've included replays of the ones I managed to solve
* It may be best to make it as obvious as possible that the car in the Knight Rider level is part of the background. I'd suggest applying a slight layer of blur and/or increasing the brightness whilst decreasing the contrast
* In general, it may be worth looking at what you can do to make it more obvious what's terrain, what are objects, what's steel: in most cases it's fine, but I definitely found myself putting CPM on a lot, and that's not a good thing. Ideally, it should be possible to play every level without using CPM at all. To be more specific, I'd say the worst offenders are the Godzilla level and the Superman level for being unclear what's terrain and what's background, and the Doctor Who level and the RoboCop level for not being clear what's terrain and what's steel. Yes, you can use CPM, but - again, ideally you shouldn't have to

N.B. - Regarding this last comment; you aren't the only content creator that could benefit from this advice btw, so don't take this too harshly - I've had to recolour terrain to differentiate it from steel as recently as the latest release of Lemminas, and I've previously had comments about some of my objects being misleading - it's all learning. Also, whilst most of the custom style sets in NeoLemmix are great, I find a few of them basically unplayable!

I hope you find this useful. I look forward to the next version of this pack!

---

P.S. I've decided not to do this pack for the First Rank LP series, primarily because it's only the one rank, and after doing Ron Stard's Rodents and Proxima's TMChallenge, I've realised that the best approach to this series is to only do packs with multiple ranks, as the first is likely to be the easiest (and that's the whole point of the series). Also - as you mentioned - the copyrighted music might cause issues on YouTube.

[WillLem]

I dont agree about the glider though cos superman doesnt need a hanglider although a cape if i could alter the position enough to make it look like its flapping in the wind might be good

Yes, exactly - this is what I meant. Lose the hangglider and just have it as Superman flying across the screen, cape a-flapping!

I dont see a way I like of changing steel and non steel without messing up the design of recognisable images such as daleks

Keep them exactly the same look and colours, but give them a 3D metallic "shine". This can be done by simply applying a reflection to one edge. If you like them as they are though, then of course leave them as is.

Personally my favourite sprite is the ghostbusters one although i am fond of the robocop one too

They're all great! The sprites are the best thing about this pack (although quite a few of the sets are unfinished). Still, big kudos!

[Dullstar]

Replays for first 8 levels. Some are probably backroutes.

Overall:

It's clear that a lot of work went into the visual presentation. Still, that's not the only consideration when making levels:

Can you guess what obstacles are considered steel and which ones are not? What's part of the background and what's terrain? This problem exists in several of the levels. Knight Rider is particularly bad. Dr. Who is probably the next worst. WillLem has a high tolerance for this compared to most of the active users here, but other players will be less forgiving. I found this to be a huge negative with the pack.

WillLem thinks the sprites are a plus; I'd say they're a minus due to being incomplete. If the sprites can be finished properly, they'd be fine, but neutrals and athletes look exactly the same as regular lemmings, which is, to say the least, frowned upon. The lack of athlete colors is bad enough, but neutrals looking the same as regular lemmings is really, REALLY bad and needs to be addressed.

I stopped at Ghostbusters. The terrain is a bit busy in that level because of the way the Menacing blood drips were used. For example, I tried separating a lemming from the crowd using a climber, but it got caught on something and got stuck in an infinite loop. I couldn't really tell what it was stuck on, and then I was just kind of annoyed and decided it was time for a break.

[Simon]

mantha16 has unpublished TeleLems. We've deleted the original topic.

-- Simon

[Strato Incendus]

I was already confused why I had supposedly opened this topic .

It's a pity, I didn't even get to test this. Maybe I would have had more positive things to say about it than the users who did get to play it. I'm willing to forgive quite a lot of mechanical hassle for the purposes of visual aesthetics... even though I have certainly grown to prefer fair levels in general, as much as pretty much anyone else who's been on the forum for a little longer, I guess.

[mantha16]

I was already confused why I had supposedly opened this topic .

It's a pity, I didn't even get to test this. Maybe I would have had more positive things to say about it than the users who did get to play it. I'm willing to forgive quite a lot of mechanical hassle for the purposes of visual aesthetics... even though I have certainly grown to prefer fair levels in general, as much as pretty much anyone else who's been on the forum for a little longer, I guess.

it was never about positive or negative it was about being constructive, how does just being like I dont like this I dont like that help anyone. WillLem phrases it more in a how about this sort of a way.

The purpose of feedback is about what you DONT like sure but its also about what you do like or constructive  suggestions.

People can say im being oversensitive or whatever but saying that I must do things a certain way is never going to get me to react well.  My husband doesn't tell me what to do so why would i let a complete stranger do it???

ok so levels that require CPM to solve ok well thats not ideal BUT I dont see it as a deal breaker in playing a level, plenty of levels i play in CPM because i don't like the aesthetics or I find it hard to read.  I don't tell the content creator they have to change it to suit me or the group as a whole.

What I find most objectionable is people telling me how I should feel about Dullstars feedback. If I found it rude and obnoxious Im perfectly entitled to say so, yes people can disagree but no one gets to dictate how another person should feel.

[grams88]

You haven't deleted your pack mantha, I'm hoping not as you put the hard work in for it. (Makes me sad)

[mantha16]

the pack hasnt been deleted as such people just cant download it anymore until i decide what im going to do with it.

[grams88]

You will probably be surprised with how popular your pack might be. Sometimes words can be very hurtful, I like the way WillLem worded it by anything negative that gets said it is balanced out with some positive words.  I always believe that to be a good approach as there will be lots of people with different skills when it comes to the making of the level packs, the newcomers to the forum getting negative feedback can put us off and discourage us from the task itself. Thanks for your kind words in relation to Skii Sloping Lemmings, yeah it is quite a hard pack to do. It can be difficult when it comes to thinking up an idea for a level and you feel that idea is great but others might not like the idea and maybe tend to criticise it.

Hoping you are not going to delete the pack or anything like that. There will be lots of people who will play your pack and really enjoy it. I almost guarantee that. There's lots of people who are not got an account here.

Hope things are okay.

[Dullstar]

Convincing mantha to remove the pack was never my intention and I regret how this turned out. I perhaps could have worded things a little better in the review. Simon describes pretty well what my actual intentions were; in a way, I kind of wrote the sort of review that I would have wanted to see if I had created the pack.

This frankness is exactly what I prefer to hear from others about my work: Direct focus on problems. I wouldn't want replies to me pampered merely to comply to feedback rules.

I often spend very little time on the positives beyond a brief mention since that's not something I find particularly helpful to me. Good to know, of course, since it explicitly states that something isn't a problem, but knowing the problems is helpful to me.

Still, since my review created a bit of a stir, I'd like to mention a few things that were done well that I perhaps should have mentioned the first time.

First, assuming my solutions were correct, the levels occupy a difficulty level that a lot of custom content is sorely missing - we've got a lot of really hard levels, and a lot of ONML Tame-like uninspired X-Of-Everything-bash/build-past-a-few-obstacles-and-you're-done levels that don't actually help players get better at the game. Most of the levels in TeleLems are simple puzzles; not too hard, but not trivial either. This is good; we need more of these levels to exist.

Second, it's very clear that the author cared about how the levels look. While the visual design sometimes gets in the way of the gameplay, it's nothing that cannot be fixed - only two of the levels require large changes; for the others, simple tweaks would suffice. I didn't comment much on this because I'll admit I'm not a huge fan of this visual style in NeoLemmix compared to traditional styles, but I know a lot of players like it, and it's something that I'm willing to tolerate as long as it's not getting in the way.

I would encourage mantha to re-release the pack. While there are issues present in the initial release, there's nothing wrong with it that cannot be fixed, and CPM makes the original release at least playable as-is. There's much, much worse levels out there - my earliest levels being an example of this, and unlike TeleLems, the issues in my older levels are much deeper-rooted and thus harder to fix.



I will also discuss my criticisms again here, but only in the context of how, specifically, they can be fixed. Since I am now including specific suggestions for changes, it will be a longer section than before, though the issues discussed are largely the same. Positive stuff takes up less space since there's not much more to say about it once it's been said . Still, I know seeing the large block of text after the problem statements could be a little disheartening, so I used some spoiler tags for the solutions to try to make it a bit more approachable and less intimidating.

1) Lemming sprites lack athlete/neutral colors.

Solution

Of these issues, the neutrals not supporting the changes are way worse; this is the part of the lemming sprites that requires the most focus. Athlete recolorings are mostly a convenience features; neutrals need to be very distinct. If you're having trouble with the technical aspects of how to do this, if you can provide the colors you want applied, I'm sure someone will be willing to help you with it.

I get the impression you designed these lemming sprites to be paired with their specific levels, which means you can probably get away with only providing the recolorations that will actually be used. So, for example, only the Dr. Who lemmings need neutral colors because it's the only level that has neutrals (at least, I didn't notice any in the last level when I took a brief glance at it), and none of the sets need zombie colors because none of the levels use zombies (again, unless one of the levels I didn't actually complete uses them but I didn't notice). Of course, it's probably best practice to provide these recolorations in case someone else decides to use them, but then again, at that point, it's their problem for using a style that didn't have the right graphics for what they were trying to make.

2) Sometimes it's unclear what's steel, what's destructable, and what's background.

Solution

This isn't about how to make levels look good; this is about how to make levels that communicate well with the player. They are not mutually exclusive, and doing both at the same time can also be a bit of an art, of course. But I will only be discussing making the layouts communicate their intentions better, not how to make levels pretty.

I probably was too harsh on this one the first time, because most of the levels aren't huge offenders. I think I played it up a bit because it's a problem that really stuck with me when it came up, and since it happens in the first level, well, that's the first impression you get, and first impressions can really stick with you. But some levels have a major issue here, so let's look at this in more detail:

First, a general piece of advice: Background objects are powerful decorative tools, but they're also very dangerous. There's a few common approaches to alleviate this problem:

- Blur background objects: Pros: can help distinguish backgrounds from non-backgrounds. Cons: kind of ugly.

- Animate background objects: Pros: makes it more clear that it's not part of the terrain, because terrain doesn't animate. Cons: can sometimes look like a trap. Still, unfamiliar objects often prompt me to use CPM in a positive way, because one of the first things I'm going to want to do is investigate it with CPM to figure out 1) exactly what it will do and 2) exactly where the trigger is.

- Change the background object into terrain Pros: very effective if the object really, really looks like it could be terrain. Cons: alters physics and only works on custom styles.

- Place background objects out of the way such that they're not in way. Pros: circumvents clarity issues. Cons: limits where such objects can be placed in the level. This is my preferred method, and the one that I use in my levels; as such, I actually have a visual example to put here:

Background Object Placed Out of the Way Example

Note that the clouds, which are not terrain, are placed below the area of terrain that the lemmings interact with.

So how can we apply this to TeleLems? The biggest problem level with background objects is the first one, with the huge car that's part of the background. TeleLems is composed entirely of custom style levels; I think the best approach here is the third method: make the car terrain. It already looks like it could be terrain, so why not? You'd have to introduce a few extra skills to get past it, but I expect a few bashers would do the trick without being problematic. Make sure to test for any backroutes this would introduce, though.

Steel usually follows a convention. Following the convention is simplest, though this approach may be difficult to implement into the Dr. Who level, where it's the largest problem. Still, I'm going to go over it here. I don't feel like grabbing more screenshots right now, so I'll just use examples from levels I've already posted pictures of:

Conventional Steel Examples

If you've played the original game, you'll already know which pieces are steel just by looking. Notice they all have the same basic setup: rectangular, nails around the sides. While these levels all happen to use the original game's styles, a lot of custom styles follow this convention. Furthermore, most examples either make it shiny (like polished metal) or a bit dull (like weathered metal that's been sitting out in the elements for a while; this is the approach taken by the original games), and typically it's a solid color. Still, it's not a requirement. Here's an example of one that uses a different approach while remaining consistent:

Different Steel Example

Of course, the major disadvantage of this is that if you're not familiar with the style, it may be a bit hard to identify where the steel is. Can you guess which part of the terrain is steel here?

Answer

It's the yellow/black striped part.

It's certainly creative, but it's not as clear. Fortunately, since this is a traditional style made up of a simple elements used to build up a more complex terrain layout, once you know what steel looks like in this set, all objects with that appearance will be consistently steel. Still, NeoLemmix allows style mixing now. I don't remember if it did at the time I made this level, but if I were to remake it now I'd definitely consider taking steel from another style that follows the convention, probably making the call based on if I used the style in multiple levels in the pack or not so the player would have a chance to learn the style's convention.

For TeleLems, in the Dr. Who level specifically: Two approaches stand out:
Option 1 (probably best): do the robot-things (I think someone said they were daleks? I'm not very familiar with Dr. Who) need to be steel? Can small adjustments be made to the level such that it would work with non-steel robot-things? It seems odd that those ARE steel, while the thing the neutrals are in is NOT steel; I'd say either both or neither should be steel (and because the neutrals are inside the ship-thing, that can't be steel or they wouldn't be able to get out. You have the design problem that the levels are made of styles the user will likely only see once. Because of this, the player doesn't have time to learn the style's steel, so they can only fall back to CPM or conventional designs.
Option 2 (only if Option 1 doesn't work): If the robot-thing must be steel for the level to work, could they be moved to serve as decorative terrain, while using conventional steel in their current locations?

3) Various tweaks that don't deserve their own section.

Spoiler

1) This kind of falls under communicating with the player through the design, but it's not related to steel or background objects. The blood-spikes in the terrain in the Ghostbusters level looks like you should be able to separate a lemming out using a climber, but if you actually try it, it gets stuck in an infinite loop. Adjustments should be made here - either make it work (potential drawback: this could majorly affect the solution), or make it more obvious that it won't work (relatively easy; just make sure they're not all pointing straight up). If you only fix one item in this section, I suggest making it this one.

2) Was I supposed to be able to do crowd control in the Godzilla level using the digger/builder trick into the palm tree? If so, make the palm tree a bit thicker to make it less finicky to pull off; if not, make it thinner so it doesn't work.

[mantha16]

see this is fantastic feedback which says exactly what you wanted to say in the first place but also includes possible fixes, even if I disagree I can at least see the logic of what you're saying rather than feeling like you are just shitting all over it.

I haven't decided what I'm going to do yet as some things are easier to fix than others

Knightrider - Ive made KITT lighter to see if that makes it blend into the background more as it does have the lights animated I don't think making it terrain would work as I specifically wanted the light to animate.  Ive made the change in the PNG file but I haven't tested it yet.

as far as steel v non steel is concerned the main reason one of the daleks is steel is because I didn't like any solution I came up with if it wasn't.  I was discussing it on discord and i was saying that Dr who is my least favourite aesthetic layout but that its because I wanted to minimise how much background was hidden as the background is gorgeous.  so theres a couple of ideas im playing with like making it smaller so I can just use it as a picture rather than the whole background.

I like more irregular steel shapes but the two ideas im mostly thinking about it either utilising one way arrows as an alternative for steel or expanding the pack so that theres multiple levels per them so whilst yes the first time you come across a gold Dalek you won't know its steel but for the remaining x levels in the dr who rank you'd know that a gold dalek is steel.  that won't reduce CPM on that first level but should reduce it overall if that makes sense because once a player if used to the conventions of a particular style theyd know it was consistant across the board.

Ghostbusters I like the dripping blood the way it is but I think maybe I can place other terrain behind it so the intented solution is forced but also that it can't be bypassed which leads to the loop.

I'm going to finish working on a collab pack and maybe do Sammings 2 which doesn't use custom stuff and is more simplistic in design intent then go back to Telelems

also thank you for the comment about the difficulty.  Mostly this is because I don't know the tricks needed to solve very difficult levels so therefore can't design them but I def agree I would like more content that is easy/medium as a maximum difficulty because thats my skill level so if I make more content at that level maybe it will encourage others to do so.