Spawn interval fixed per level

[ccexplore]

Level designers are reluctant to give runners, no matter whether they introduce backroutes or not, merely because they are a skill. The intuition is that giving extra skills is bad. This is a psychological hurdle [not always, there is something to it, see Labyrinth of Despair below], even if well motivated from Lemmings.

I can't speak for all level designers, but surely, given the abundant historical evidence that level designers themselves tend to miss backroutes that eventually found by others, and adding a skill at minimum forces a re-checking of the level for backroutes, this reluctance is a little more than psychology, compare to your analogy with time limits.  The best that can be said is that runners probably enable less unanticipated actions compare to other skills.

It is also fair to point out that explicitly giving skills may provide more of a hint to the player compare to variable SI, though arguably that is more due to a longstanding tradition of leaving the SI variable.

Incidentally, have people personally tried out executing those updated solutions using runners?  Nepster suggested that it might feel like going from untimed to timed bombers, it might be worthwhile to see if others feel the same in practice.

I'm a little bit exhausted, because the other proponents of everywhere-fixed-SI haven't posted at all yet. Maybe it's convenient to let me do all the front-line work, but I will forget, misvalue, or misrepresent pro-fixed-SI arguments, too.

I kind of feel like you already posted most if not all of the arguments to be said for pro fixed-SI.  Since pretty much everyone here have already experienced variable SI, there's little personal experience to draw from or resonate with in terms of the positives of never having to deal with it.  Meaning they can agree to some of those positives in principle, but would not feel as strongly about them as things they have actually experienced in the past.  Proponents can talk about and resonate experience-wise with some of the bad things enabled by variable SI, but then you'd still need to bring up the additional arguments to support elimination over merely discouraging use of variable SI.

But yes, if there are some pro-fixed-SI arguments that someone feels Simon has not yet done justice to, let's hear it.

[Simon]

Update from IRC yesterday. "VSI" == variable spawn interval, either per level, or as a game feature to allow it. In case it's unclear which of the two is meant, ask.

Visibility: In a level with VSI, VSI should become more visible/pronounced in the user interface. Right now, VSI doesn't look like an important feature, but sometimes, it is critically important. This is a mismatch.

Announce rare time limit: I would like to have a big, flashy warning on starting a singleplayer level with time limit. No-time-limit is the norm, but time limits occur often enough to become very annoying if unnoticed.

Announce rare VSI: If level designers allow VSI only where it's required or probably helpful, VSI levels should get a similar warning, or really obvious UI support for VSI. I believe this is unnatural, but namida wouldn't find it that strange.

Make pack work with/without VSI: I see Nepster's suggestion as an improvement over the status quo: If it's easy to design a level without requiring VSI, then make it solvable with the default SI. Most levels in the community pack can be easily adapted. The solution isn't always runners, it's often much simpler.

No replacement: Spawn interval cannot be replaced 1-to-1 with skills. There is no equivalent.  Runners replace only one use case, and have their own drawbacks. 1-to-1 translation to skills would mean skills like "stall faller/walker that has just come from the hatch", which introduce extra mechanics that, like VSI, clash with the game design of "every interaction is a skill, you get to choose almost freely to whom to assign".

Trampolines: Neither Proxima nor I like these too much, they behave strangely and defy intuition. They fit better into the game than VSI, because they're purely reactive to lixes, not introducing new player-lix interaction. I'd be neutral or moderately happy to remove them. They're used in 2 lemforum levels, 2 Clam levels, 3 Rubix levels. In multiplayer, trampolines haven't spiced up levels, only made stupid levels more stupid. But that would be material for a new thread.

Still pro-fixed-SI: I continue to believe that culling SI is a bit healthier than Nepster's suggestion. We offer anti-frustration by high-performance framestepping and by deprecating unnecessary pixel precision. Yes, level design would change slightly, because VSI is not the easy route out of designing clustering anymore. Finding the appropriate SI becomes a job of the level designer instead of the player.

-- Simon

[Proxima]

So, as I said, I want to reply to the general argument, rather than focusing on specific levels. It's true that a couple of levels don't work with fixed SI (The Hotel in Hell can probably be fixed even though the fixes suggested so far have been shown not to work; The Continuum Hypothesis certainly doesn't work without drastic changes). Still, I'm not convinced by the general argument that removing VSI is a good thing and the individual levels that don't work are the main problems standing in the way.

The main "anti" argument seems to be that VSI isn't the "core" of gameplay. But in the first place, it's not easy to say what the core of a game is. And many games have supporting features that are not part of the core, but make the game more enjoyable, whether it's by adding variety or aiding usability or both: bombs in Touhou, powerups in Super Mario World, bonus stages in Sonic, etc.

As for Lemmings and Lix, while giving skills to lemmings is certainly part of the core, so too is the fact that they wander back and forth when not performing skills. That immediately makes spacing important. This article, recently linked on the forums, suggests that the makers considered traps part of the core, and setting SI to compress two lemmings so only one is killed is a major mechanism for getting past a trap.

But really, the main question should be whether keeping VSI makes the game, overall, more enjoyable or not. I do agree that fiddling about with the SI to get a particular spacing can be a bit irksome. But Nepster makes a good point: fiddling about with skills can be as bad or worse. And it's not something you can really get away from, because altering spacing is an inherent part of the game, whether it's to get one lemming past a trap, give a builder enough space to finish building a bridge, get enough lemmings into a dig pit before it goes all the way down, and so on and so on. If you take away VSI as a tool for these things, players are going to have to do the same things with whatever tools they have left. Focusing the discussion on levels that cannot be solved without VSI misses the point that it aids on a lot of other levels. Changing SI is a relatively clean way to alter spacing, because if you can work out the spacing you need, you can just enter it as a number. While it's true that this is drastically different from interacting with lemmings by clicking on them, so too is framestepping to move the assignment of skills to an exact time, and that was judged to be a good thing to add to Lix to aid execution.

* * *

I also want to talk about discoverability. Simon's first point is correct: as-is, Lix's UI does not make it obvious what the SI buttons do. That is a reason for improving the UI, not (in itself) a good reason for removing the feature. I have suggested an icon of two lix with a double-headed arrow between, a standard symbol for "spacing".

Simon's second point, "They aren't needed in 98 % of the levels, and don't scream "use me" once they are", is thinking in the wrong direction. Lix is a puzzle game, and telling the player "this feature is needed for this puzzle" is providing a hint before they've even started thinking about the puzzle. It's as if we proposed to have every level start with the skill you need first already selected. Sure, it makes the program easier to use, and might sound on paper like a good idea, but it hurts the enjoyment of starting from a hintless puzzle and a given set of tools and working out for yourself which of those tools will help you solve the puzzle. If we solve the issue of making it more discoverable that VSI exists, then the issue of players being stuck because VSI is needed for such-and-such puzzle and they don't know it exists automatically goes away.

For the same reason, the suggestion to make fixed SI the norm and set the SI to variable only when needed for a level is absolutely terrible. First, it necessarily provides an unwanted hint; secondly, it takes away a tool that is often useful even when not necessarily required. The ability of level designers to fix SI on individual levels for backroute prevention is fine, but other than that, ultimately we have to decide whether we (as a whole, on balance) think the pros of VSI outweigh the cons or they do not; in which case VSI should either be fully allowed or never allowed.

[Simon]

Thanks for the detailed reply.

You're making a solid point for choosing one of two extremes: Either cull the VSI, or make it well-accessible and discoverable with improved buttons. As a player, changing the SI is free of charge. To embrace the VSI, then, authors should fix the SI only to prevent backroutes, similar to imposing time limits.

When Icho was with me 3 days ago, I played a new level by him. Had the SI been fixed, I would have solved it faster. I thought the level needed VSI when it did not. If we embrace VSI, we encourage authors to keep this red herring wherever possible. This is unlike other standard settings: Choosing no time limit, no skill of a certain type, no surprisingly low save requirement, etc., all these streamline the player's pathfinding.

Having default red herrings is not bad per se, because it's a puzzle game. It makes the game more complex, but it's not unfair.

I would like to distinguish VSI sharply from framestepping, because framestepping doesn't affect physics. Since we have always allowed text-editing replays, we don't gain more control by framestepping. It improves the user experience without touching the game design.

Framestepping is not an interaction with lemmings, VSI is. They're different fundamentally, and neither justifies existence of the other.

VSI remains odd: Either it's part of the core idea, otherwise there is nothing in the fixed-SI game that suggests adding VSI. While VSI influences the fundamental, important spacing between lemmings, so would teleportation.

Yeah, in the end, it boils down to staking out the underlying design, then supporting that in a powerful way.

-- Simon

[Clam]

It's not mentioned here, but Simon and I had a chat about this shortly before he started the topic. And when I first saw the topic, it already had a page full of replies, which I'll admit put me off posting, especailly since I'd given my views on IRC already. But it's more visible here, and I've thought of new things since. So:

I'm firmly in favour of culling variable spawn interval. And this is coming from a level designer .

My main problems with VSI:

• Tedious micromanagement. I'd rather not put the player through that, or let them do it to themselves when they don't need to.
• The "red-herring" factor. Is this one of the few levels where you actually have to fiddle with SI? Maybe not, but it's always nagging in the back of the mind.
• Too much freedom at no cost. How many skills is that worth?
• Inconsistency in the minimum SI. Is it 1, 4, same as max, or something else?
• You're controlling the hatches as well as the rodents. IMHO that's not supporting the core idea of the game.

Against culling VSI:

• Loss of control compared to what we're used to. That takes some adjustment.
• Upsetting level designers. My hunch is this isn't so bad when culling one feature, but gets increasingly worse with the number of culls.

Effect on my levels if VSI is culled:
(Henceforth: FSI = fixed spawn interval, applied to a single level.)

• Two have VSI as their core idea and would be lost.
• One needed VSI but I've recently adapted it to FSI.
• The rest (about 90) either already have FSI or (IMHO) lose nothing if changed to FSI.

I can definitely live with that. But in my case, the damage is spread thinner over more levels – I have roughy a "pack" worth anyway. I empathise with designers who lose a larger proportion of their levels to this.

[Simon]

Thanks for taking the time to reply in detail.

We have similar opinions and judgements on VSI. Nonetheless, it's valuable to distill a longer argument/opinion from IRC into a summarizing post.

I've claimed that the bad existing user interface for VSI is a reason to for everywhere-fixed SI. That wasn't a valid argument, because the user interface can be made better. You've focused purely on game design, that holds more water.

-- Simon

[Proxima]

I think it's worth pointing out, in reply to the earlier discussion in Clam's link, that L1 challenges often required extreme fine-tuning of RR, due to the sliding glitch. This is absent in Lix, and so far I have not observed any Lix levels requiring such fine-tuning or even suggesting that it would be helpful. SI precision is generally used either to space two particular lix, or to merge the entire crowd; in either case, finding a correct value only needs to be done once or twice in a solution.