geoo visits Simon, February 2023

[Simon]

Here is the story about NieSch's Tomb of Doom from Level Design Contest 27.

The image shows the lower half of Tomb of Doom. geoo and I each played on our machines next to each other. We tried for half an hour to find an efficient way across the lower-left pool.



Eventually, geoo said: "I want to use the Highland-10 trick to fling a worker out of the water pool."

L2 always flings lemmings upwards, even if they're below the epicenter of a flinging explosion. This method allows to save 100 % on Highland 10 instead of the intended lose-1. As in the gif, you mortar close to the faller, thus fling the faller to the bottom-right side.

You can even use a variant of the trick where you don't fling a faller, but a drowner, which will fly upwards out of the water and thus survive.

Well, this is all very nice in theory, but Tomb of Doom doesn't give us any mortars. namida never added flinging to NeoLemmix, thus the Highland-10 idea can't lead to anything promising. Right?

Spoiler for Tomb of Doom

Right, at least in so far as how there is indeed no way to fling in NeoLemmix.

Knowing this, I asked geoo: "With which exploder do you want to fling the lemmings?"



He pointed to the regular L1 bomber and said: "With this."

Certainly, the L1 bomber isn't strong enough to fling, thus ...



... I pointed to the nuke, and I asked: "Why not with this?"

We had good chuckle, haha, how funny, the nuke doesn't fling either, of course. We continued to search for 10-20 more minutes. None of us found any good way across the water, let alone a way to fling drowners out of the water.



Eventually, geoo rose in his seat, raised his finger, and said:

"Nuke level!"

And that insight led us to the intended solution to Tomb of Doom. It had nothing to do with the lower-left pond, or with any trick from Highland 10.

To this day, I don't know if I helped geoo subconciously by joking about the nuke, or if he found the nuke via unrelated trains of thought.

In hindsight, until we found the nuke solution, we didn't use the entire middle-right area. Such a large unused area always feels fishy. I had felt that we lacked a core concept, but I hadn't been able to narrow it down.

NieSch, thanks for the most memorable a-ha effect of the contest-solving weekend!

-- Simon

[NieSch]

You're welcome. And thank you for these amusing - and well illustrated - anecdotes.