[Lemmings 3] Quest From Kieran 3 Development Thread

[kieranmillar]

This pack has been released, please download from the release thread: https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=4072.0

Welcome to my level pack, Quest From Kieran 3! It's a pack for Lemmings 3 aka The All New World of Lemmings aka The Lemmings Chronicles.

Lemmings 3 is the black sheep of the original trilogy, and for good reason. The gameplay is very different and the responsiveness of the controls are terrible. But hiding underneath the bad level design of the original game is a puzzle engine with a lot of potential. I hope to unlock that potential in this pack.

In this pack the aim is to save everybody and restore the tribe back to the 60 lemmings they started as in Lemmings 2. Some levels have very easy solutions if you choose to ignore the stragglers. Don't do this! The real puzzle is to save everyone! Remember: 2nd place is just 1st place loser!

This pack is designed for Adults mode, don't play it in Kids mode!

It's probably been a very long time since you last played Lemmings 3, or maybe you've never played it at all. There's a number of things you should know:

• If you right-click on a lemming, you will highlight it, which makes it easy to select in a crowd. If you right-click anywhere else, you will cycle through highlighting all lemmings that have tools. Highlighting is vital to master for this pack.
• Jumpers are ridiculously unresponsive. Click furiously on the lemming so that it works.
• If a blocker is on flat ground, another lemming can jump over him. Use this to separate out a single lemming without having to juggle everyone.
• Each tribe starts with 20 lemmings, and some lemmings exist on the level already as "stragglers", trapped in ridiculous locations. If you save these stragglers, you add them to your total count.
• As long as the number of lemmings you have is 10 or more, only 10 lemmings will drop form the trapdoor at the start of the level, with the rest held in reserve. If a lemming dies, one of these reserve lemmings will drop from the trapdoor. As the aim of this pack is to save everyone, this doesn't really matter.
• You can cancel blockers with walkers. If they are on flat ground, they will carry on walking in the direction they were originally facing. If the ground is not flat, the blocker will balance over the edge, and will always return to a walker facing away from the drop.
• You can cancel shimmiers with the walker skill.
• You do not have to activate floaters and swimmers, they deploy automatically.
• Climbers can be activated very far in advance, as long as the lemming does not drop or do something else the lemming will store the command until he reaches the next wall.
• If you try to build straight down or dig straight up, the lemming will turn around. Often this is easier than trying to assign a walker, but you can only do it if there is at least one valid digging or building direction.
• If you are digging towards a cliff edge and will run out of spades when you reach the end, it might be safer to assign a blocker rather than a walker.
• Sometimes, for whatever reason, a lemming digging diagonally up or down will turn around when he can't dig any more. Usually you will try to turn him around thinking he will walk off the cliff, causing him to turn around again back towards the cliff. Very annoying. Be aware of this, maybe assign a blocker so you can more easily respond.

An enormous thank you to Carl Reinke aka Mindless, for open sourcing lem3edit, so I could update and improve it, without which this level pack might not have happened.

Meet the Tribes!

Classic

Tool focus: Bricks, Spades



Stuck in their ways for so long, the Classic tribe have been forced to adapt to the new world, but old habits die hard. These guys maintain their expertise at building and digging.

Egyptian

Tool focus: Suckers, Shimmiers



You can't spend years building large tombs and pyramids and not become adapt at scaling large terrain and crossing large gaps.

Shadow

Tool focus: Umbrellas, Swimmers, Bombs, Hadokens



The masters of traveling where you least expect them, the Shadow tribe love nothing more than sneaking behind dangerous areas unnoticed and then dropping loud explosives. Hey, you can't be quiet all the time.

How to use level replays
Lemmings 3 will automatically record your moves, and let you play them back by pressing R. This will play back your previous attempt and you can cancel it and intervene at any time by doing something other than pause or fast-forward. Problem: in Adults mode, solving the level in this way refuses to let you progress, which is really dumb. Good news, attached to this post you will find a save file, which you can use to unlock all levels, therefore being blocked from making progress doesn't matter! When you solve the level, press the Replay Save button on the map screen and the level will get a red R symbol on it, you can use this to keep track of which levels you've 100%ed. Replays can be saved even if you solved them using the replay feature.

To watch a replay you saved, right-click on the level.

How to Install
Either:
1) Backup the contents of the LEVELS folder of your Lemmings 3 data directory (where you extracted the contents of the CD) and then extract the contents of the zip file into there, overwriting the existing files.
2) Duplicate your Lemmings 3 data directory, extract the contents of the zip file into the LEVELS folder, overwriting the existing levels, then point your DosBox instance to mount this new data directory as the D drive.

[kieranmillar]

The Egypt Tribe is now available! Where Classic focussed on bricks and spades, Egypt focusses on climbers and shimmiers. The save file download has also been updated to provide all Egypt levels.

Note that while it may seem the Egyptian tribe came quickly, 23 levels were already completed by the time the Classic Tribe was released. The Shadow Tribe currently has no levels built, so it will easily be over a month until you see its release.

New downloads attached to the first post.

v02 changelog:

• Egypt Tribe!
• Classic 26 : Changed how tools are positioned to make it less likely the lemming will get stuck unable to drop a tool.

[mobius]

I while ago I said I wanted to stream this at some point; I'm afraid its looking like this will not happen, as I cannot stream at all any time soon.
But I will likely play it on my own time and give written feedback.
(of course; if it's anything like the L2 pack, I may not get real far into it )

[kieranmillar]

Don't worry about streaming mobius. As I wasn't sure when I started making this pack if anybody at all would play an L3 pack, I am extremely grateful for any amount of feedback in any format.

As for difficulty, like QFK2 this pack strives to do something interesting in each level, this means no filler levels filled with extremely obvious tool use like the original L3. However QFK2 with its skill restrictions per tribe and only 10 levels meant that once the most interesting interactions were done there was little room left for more easier content. In L3, with 30 levels per tribe, there is more time to play around with simpler things before all the levels get incredibly hard, but the pack still probably errs on the side of being hard. I'd say once you pass level 10-ish of each tribe levels start to get consistently tricky.

The late 20s are really hard, particularly for the  Egypt Tribe. I offer no apologies for this

Shadow will probably have the largest portion of easier levels at the front if the current levels ideas I have are to go by, but I guess that's not so helpful for you just yet.

[Simon]

I solved QFK3 Classic 5 through Classic 14 on livestream. Vod (available for 14 days)

-- Simon

[kieranmillar]

I have updated the first post with a new version. Nothing major here, just a pass through the existing levels to fix bugs that Simon found, alongside a new bug that could be exploited in a load of levels, and some other small miscellaneous fixes. Sadly, the bug cannot be completely stopped in every level, for example Egypt 30 will have to remain susceptible to this bug, but I expect players to not use these bugs. I figured I would fix them where possible, because why not?

There is no new save file because no lemming counts changed.

v03 changelog:

• Classic 5 - Prevented straggler executing Hitting Your Head Prevents Fall Damage bug.
• Classic 11

  Classic 11 - Decided it was OK to jump over monsters here in the grand scheme of things, as fixing this caused other issues, and instead made a minor terrain tweak to make intended solution more obvious.
• Classic 13 - Prevented One-Way Brick bug.
• Classic 14 - Prevented One-Way Brick bug.
• Classic 15 - Tweaked release rate to make accidental multi-tasking less likely.
• Classic 18 - Prevented Hitting Your Head Prevents Fall Damage bug.
• Classic 21 - Prevented Hitting Your Head Prevents Fall Damage bug.
• Classic 24 - Prevented Hitting Your Head Prevents Fall Damage bug.
• Classic 25 - Prevented Hitting Your Head Prevents Fall Damage bug.
• Classic 27 - Extra Hadouken and swapped potato beast for double Lemme Fatale.
• Classic 28 - Prevented Hitting Your Head Prevents Fall Damage bug.
• Classic 30 - Minor layout change to prevent Hitting Your Head Prevents Fall Damage bug without causing minor backroute.
• Egypt 14 - Prevented Hitting Your Head Prevents Fall Damage bug.
• Egypt 15 - Prevented Hitting Your Head Prevents Fall Damage bug.
• Egypt 17 - Extra Hadouken and swapped potato beast for double Lemme Fatale.
• Egypt 20 - Prevented Hitting Your Head Prevents Fall Damage bug.
• Egypt 27 - Prevented Hitting Your Head Prevents Fall Damage bug.
• Egypt 28 - More steel to prevent backroute.

EDIT: v03b changelog: Classic 27 no longer impossible due to my total stupidity. Doh!

[kieranmillar]

The Shadow Tribe currently has no levels built, so it will easily be over a month until you see its release.

9 months is still technically more than a month.

The Shadow Tribe is now done, which means all levels are now complete for this pack. The Shadow Tribe has a primary focus on the remaining tools, Bombs, Umbrellas, Swimmers and Hadokens. There are no grenades anywhere in this pack.

Under my current expectations I will give this pack the full release at the beginning of 2019. That is because I don't expect anybody to play Lemmings 3, and therefore imagine there will be no more updates.

The new version is in the opening post, along with an updated full save file that includes the Shadow levels.

v04 changelog:

• Shadow Tribe!

[kieranmillar]

This will see its full release in a short while.

The final release has the following changes over version 4:

• Classic 22 - Fixed backroute
• Egypt 14 - Minor tweak to encourage finding the less fiddly intended solution
• Egypt 24 - Minor tweak to be a bit cleaner
• Shadow 07 - Fixed backroute

I see no real reason to release another testing version for these changes as the last one has had zero feedback (although given its Lemmings 3, I expected as such).