ideas

[finlay]

How does one come up with level ideas? I'm really no good at it! Any thoughts?

[ccexplore]

I'd say I'm not that good at it either.  I think there are two general approaches you can try:

1) If you are artistically inclined, you can start from the visual end of things, and just try to put together a level that looks good.  Then tweak the skillset (and terrain if needed) and see if you can come up with a decent puzzle as well.  Starting with all skills available in generous amounts, and then gradually see how the level plays out with less and less skills (particularly if you take away certain types of skills altogether) is a good way to proceed.

2) If you are more left-brained, you can try to come up with puzzle ideas based on various tricks and techniques you might have seen from official levels as well as other people's levels.  There are a number of (by no means exhaustive) general ideas you can look at:
  a) various means of crowd control, beyond the simplest of blocking to hold them off
  b) multitasking
  c) see if you can make the release rate a core part of the puzzle
  d) take advantage of transient effects of performing a skill.   That is, instead of simply looking at the effects of a completed bridge, or a through-and-through basher/miner/digger tunnel, think about how a lemming may take advantage of a still-in-progress bridge or tunnel.  As a simple example, a lemming can turn around once at the wall of a digger's tunnel just a little bit before the digger breaks through, and you would have diverted a lemming to go in the opposite direction than where everyone else would.  Some skills like bashers can even be interrupted mid-stroke to create interesting effects on the terrain (in the case of basher, you can create a sort of "step" that way).
  e) Look at skills in terms of the exact area of terrain added or removed on each "stroke/step" can reveal some creative ways to make use of them, beyond their standard uses.  The "A.T." trick is one spectacular example, where we consider the fact that you can create a single step by digging down the sides of a wall almost but not quite to the bottom, and then multiplying that effect to create multiple steps to scale great heights.  Less spectacular but other useful concepts:
    - a miner's stroke not only takes out terrain below and in front, but also some terrain overhead.  So if you have a thin platform overhead you can break it in addition to the standard mining-tunnel effect.
    - digging near to a thin vertical wall will effectively break through the wall.
    - think of a builder's bricks as simply general added pixels of terrain, and you can come up with many interesting uses beyond the standard bridge.  For example, stack a few build bridges to create a sort of wall.  Fill up tiny notches/gaps on a wall with a build brick to make the wall climbable.  Use bridges to provide terrain connecting two walls, so you can mine through both with one miner.  The possibilities are endless!
  f) Sometimes you may want to use a skill not so much for its "typical" effect, but for some secondary side effect (and if you can take advantage of both effects at once, good for you).  A classic example is to turn a lemming around by having him build and bump his head on a ceiling.  Even bashing on thin air, which seems completely useless, has the side effect of delaying the lemming, which may well have significant consequences down the line.
  g) definitely make good use of climbers and floaters.  They are the means by which a selected number of lemmings can get to places normal lemmings can't

Perhaps the ultimate advice is simply practice, practice, practice.  Start creating levels without worrying too much about how bad they might be starting off, and one day you may find yourself becoming quite a decent level designer!  Besides, there are many level solvers out there of different calibers, so you don't have to make it a goal for every level to be the hardest puzzle ever.  Just aim for fun, enjoyable, interesting.

[finlay]

hmmm... also, where's the best place to put my created levels... and where would i get other people's levels? I mean i have got a lot that I've downloaded in the past but i don't know where to start with any of them... and then they're often too hard and I get bored.

I just tried putting them in that stickied upload page but it didn't accept the zip file. I take it I have to compile them into a DAT file or something? That'll take AAGES, Lemedit is SLOW.

[finlay]

Got it working. http://lemmings-db.camanis.net/levelpack/agpsZW1taW5ncy0zchALEglMZXZlbFBhY2sYiScM/" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">http://lemmings-db.camanis.net/levelpack/agpsZW1taW5ncy0zchALEglMZXZlbFBhY2sYiScM/

Have a try - the only one I'm kinda proud of is number 3, "Fiery depths", because I haven't seen the trick in it used before. I included one that I uploaded to another thread as level 6 which is just an obnoxious bomber timing level and one as number 4 which is just a bit silly. Number 1 was another proof-of-concept idea but not a particularly difficult level.

I'm quite impressed with that database, taking screenshots of all the levels. http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/shocked.gif" alt=":o" title="Shocked" class="smiley" />

Now i'm just back to "hmm, don't have any more ideas!" http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/tongue.gif" alt=":P" title="Tongue" class="smiley" />

[ccexplore]

Well, I was just about to submit my reply, and then you pretty much eliminated the need. http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/XD.gif" alt=":XD:" title="XD" class="smiley" /> http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/wink.gif" alt=";)" title="Wink" class="smiley" />  Well maybe one thing left:

Lemedit is SLOW.

Yeah, LemEdit does some stuff which apparently taxes DOSBox somewhat.  You can make it a little faster by bumping up the emulation speed ("CPU Cycles") to something high, like 10000-20000, though loading and saving levels will still happen at snail's pace.  http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/sad.gif" alt=":(" title="Sad" class="smiley" /> Unfortunately, DOSBox has an emulation bug where if the CPU Cycle is set too high, the music for PC Lemmings may not play, so you'll want to drop the emulation speed back down to something like 3000-4000 when you actually play the levels in CustLemm.  Such is life in emulation land. http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/undecided.gif" alt=":-\" title="Undecided" class="smiley" />

[ccexplore]

Had a quick look at the levels.  Definitely like the concept behind #1. http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/thumbsup.gif" alt=":thumbsup:" title="Thumbs Up" class="smiley" />  The levels are as you said not particular difficult (it feels like I can solve most of them on first glance in my head), but that's not necessarily a bad thing as not everyone necessarily wants super-hard levels.  The levels are not a bad way to get your hands wet on making levels, and actually you seem pretty productive given presumably how few days you've spent on all these levels!

One thing I've noticed is that many of the levels seem a bit "builder-heavy".  I think there's a general distaste in this forum for builder-heavy levels as building takes time and can get tedious, but that's more a personal taste thing, and you are probably no worse an offender than, say, a good number of actual levels from the official Lemmings game. http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/winktounge.gif" alt=";P" title="Wink-Tongue" class="smiley" />

[finlay]

It's a bit of a lie, really - most of them are ones that I designed a few years ago and never shared at the time or whatever, and the only one that is new is the 6th.

You see, I have had ideas in the past, I just never know how to start a new one. I keep messing around with the editor and giving up after 10 minutes. I guess that's normal though.

(As for the builder-heaviness, it's central to the concept of #3, was put in #1 so that it was actually a playable level rather than a bunch of floating islands and an exit on the floor, and as I say, #4 was something I added just because it looks funny. I'm not that much of a fan of builders either http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/tongue.gif" alt=":P" title="Tongue" class="smiley" />)

[Nortaneous]

Most of my levels started as ideas of interesting skill sequences (climber climbs up a wall and another lemming builds stairs to catch it, basher bashes out a tunnel through a useless-looking pipe at the top of the level, whatever) and grew from there, usually into things that were nothing like what they originally started out as being. Sometimes I can get two levels out of the same idea (City of Satan and Unidentified Lemming Object for the climber thing).

[Clam]

I've tried all sorts of ways of making new levels. I tend not to stick to one method for too long (or to one version even, I diverted my attention to Lemmings Chronicles at one point, and also L2 momentarily). A good chunk of my levels come from the "combine two skills in a neat way" department, but I've also done visual designs with lemmings thrown in, obscure glitches or quirks in the game mechanics, and even (*gasp*) easy levels with heaps of spare skills. I'm struggling to think of new levels at the moment, but the (vague) ideas I have right now involve severe glitch abuse, which isn't the easiest thing to build a fun level around http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/undecided.gif" alt=":-\" title="Undecided" class="smiley" />

[GigaLem]

*a bit off topic but*

You know lomax adventures
How bout taking his sprites and puting them in sonic 1
Like
Lomax the lemming in Sonic 1?   http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/huh.gif" alt="???" title="Huh?" class="smiley" />

[namida]

HONESTLY GIGA, JUST SHUT THE f*** UP.

Now that that's done...

I use a variety of methods for my levels. Some start as an interesting design idea which I then create a puzzle around - Lemmerixo, Express Lane and Snowed In being some examples of this. Others, start from the trick and I then work this into a level - the most well known such level from me being Oblivion. Still others come from a basic concept, with no specific trick, worked into a level - for example, To The End! where my thoughts were something along the lines of "Okay, there's many levels with 20 of everything... and sometimes they 0 something that's useful but not entirely essential. How about a level that takes away a key skill?". Yet others may originally come simply from me messing around and placing random blocks, in other words, pretty much accidental strokes of genius - No Time To Die is a great example of this. Other times, I may just create a few easy levels, which I generally design to be fun to play, and I end up finding a very hard skill set for them - Return of the T is one such level here.

One very unusual case is with "The Deadly Climb" and "Not Gonna Work" from LP DOS Project. The original level was The Deadly Climb (built from the "work a trick into a level" style), with "Not Gonna Work" originally being made as an easier version to fill space, requiring only 75% and also giving 20 blockers. I then challenged myself to 100% this level (which also requires not using blockers as this level provides no way to free them), and for ages I thought this was impossible but kept trying different things, until eventually I found a way to do it that *just* worked. Thus, a harder level than The Deadly Climb - originally itself intended as the harder version - had been born.

[finlay]

Here, I made a level today. I was wondering if you guys could try it. http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/thumbsup.gif" alt=":thumbsup:" title="Thumbs Up" class="smiley" />

This is in lieu of making a pack of levels, obviously. I just want to see if you can solve it (it's not too hard) and more importantly if you can backroute it. I've tried to get rid of the backroutes that were more obvious to me but I'm sure there must still be a way.

(However, if you're going to reply to this, note that I don't have Lemmix and therefore can't run replays, so describing your solution to me will probably be easier.)

Anyway, even as I write I'm thinking of a couple of things that I could improve about the level but I can't be bothered just now and I'm going away over the weekend... Hope you like it, anyway.

[ccexplore]

Not sure if it's a backroute or not but I've attached a screenshot of my solution.  The screenshot should be self-explanatory.  I changed the color of 2 of the build bricks to yellow so they show up more clearly.

This level is a great example of designing a level "visuals first".  Love the Eiffel Tower concept and the resulting puzzle is pretty good, neither too hard nor too trivial.  I like it.

[ccexplore]

This is in lieu of making a pack of levels, obviously.

Levelpaks are overrated anyway, they are typically nothing more than some "random" (slight exaggeration but you'll see my point) collection of levels the author decides to throw together.  Most levels in a levelpak have little to no interrelations between levels (the rare few might have repeats, or "part 1"/"part 2"s.  Truly rare are levelpaks that actually have a common theme running throughout all its levels).  Our brains certainly don't come up with spurts of multiple levels, we simply come up with them one by one until there're somehow "enough levels" to be thrown into a "pack".

So yeah, feel free to showcase levels individually instead of in packs.  It's easier than ever to play LVL files directly with Lemmix and all that.

[finlay]

This level is a great example of designing a level "visuals first".  Love the Eiffel Tower concept and the resulting puzzle is pretty good, neither too hard nor too trivial.  I like it.

Thanks... I try. http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/wink.gif" alt=";)" title="Wink" class="smiley" />

Yeah, yours isn't the same solution as mine – there is that slight problem in that I don't quite know how to anticipate the fact that bashers don't always stop when you want them to! I thought that a basher on the second level would only go through the central pillar.

Quite a few of the little bumps and gaps in the terrain are me trying to anticipate other examples of this. For instance, I realised that you could have just bashed straight through at the floor of the first level, which is why the spinner trap and the metal block on the right came about. I'll do a screenie of my intended solution in a minute.

By the way, did you build a step on the rocky floor there, where there's a yellow dot? You shouldn't have needed to...

Edit:
Here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15543016/lem-eiffel.png" class="bbc_link" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15543016/lem-eiffel.png

build in the little notch so that you make a step so that when you bash the first brick away your lemmings end up on the right and don't fall into the trap. then build to the left when the lemming turns back over the steel block so that it ends up on the top of the brick, then build to the right to get out of the tower. for 100% you should also make the first lemming who turns back to the left build before he drops in the Seine. now you build to the exit, let a lemming who turns back to the left become a climber and mine+build to release the inner lemmings.