SubLems: Large SuperLemmini levelpack

[Colorful Arty]

I was told to create a separate page for this, so here goes:

In fall 2014, I started dabbling in Lemmings level design, making levels originally for LemmixPlayer, then Lemmini, and now SuperLemmini. Fortunately, most of the levels I made in Lemmini transferred over to SuperLemmini without a hitch. (Mostly...)

Although it is not complete yet, I am proud to announce my levelpack: SubLems! (The name has nothing to do with my name, it's a play on sublime)

Thus far, SubLems has 7 difficulty levels: Newbie, Sweet, Scary, Chaotic, Insane, Hellish, and Retro. The middle 5 are the main difficulty ratings, having 20 levels apiece, with a gentle difficulty curve, while Newbie has 10 tutorial levels, and Retro contains 20 levels from Lemmings and Oh no! More Lemmings with different skill assignments. If I stick to this, SubLems will be ready to play fairly soon (although exactly when, I don't know). Now that that's done, I have some questions I would like some feedback on.

Question 1: am I allowed to put copyrighted music in the game? Right now, each level has a unique music track that plays on it, but lots of them are copyrighted in some way.

Question 2: Should I up the amount of levels in the 5 main difficulties to 25? Doing so would make a better learning curve, but it would mean SubLems would not be available for a longer time.

Question 3: What advice can you give a relatively amateur Lemmings level designer. Plenty of my levels are lacking in the scenery department, and most of my levels are quite small.

Question 4: Are any of my difficulty names used by other packs? If so, I have some backup names.

With that, I leave you with these screenshots of some of the levels I have completed!


Level 1 of Sweet: "Piece of Cake!" (Not all levels in Sweet look like actual sweets though)




"It's a hot one!" A level from Scary. (The exact level is still to be determined)




Did I mention this pack has BOSS FIGHTS!? Because it does. One for each of the five main difficulties.

[IchoTolot]

These look really nice

Question 1:   You have to make this up with yourself. I personally tend to mostly use the music from the Lemmings games, free to use stuff and from people I got the permission to use it.

Question 2:   100% your own decision!

Question 3:   Huge or small doesn't matter. An interesting, clever solution is what people love the most.  Go through the Level Design Board! Many topics about this are already there

Question 4:   Insane is used, but don't bother yourself too much with one out of seven rating names that is already used       Take what you like!

[Proxima]

Q3. Don't be afraid to post your levels, but do listen to feedback when it comes. The more practice you have and the more you listen to feedback, the faster you'll improve.

There are a few guidelines that have developed over the years as we've noticed patterns in feedback. None of these are absolute rules, but it's good to be aware of them. Generally, players dislike hidden traps, normal terrain that looks like steel and vice versa, strict execution or time limits, and long levels that are mostly "hold the crowd and do everything, which is mostly building, with one lemming".

Q4. Akseli kindly provided a list of previously used rating names. Of course, duplicating a previously used name doesn't matter very much, and there are a few duplicates on the list already.

[grams88]

Oh those ones look really nice. I like the fire one as that one sure looks tricky and hard trying to get to the exit. I feel sorry for the lemmings in that fire level, they must be roasting to death.

I think everyone has their own style when it comes to creating levels. One I tend to like is the searching for the exit type of level although I would probably stick to one or two of these type of levels where you hide the exit in the ground somewhere.

The hidden trap thing might be frustrating if you were to use it a lot.

Welcome to the forum Colorful Arty.

[namida]

Question 1: am I allowed to put copyrighted music in the game? Right now, each level has a unique music track that plays on it, but lots of them are copyrighted in some way.
Question 2: Should I up the amount of levels in the 5 main difficulties to 25? Doing so would make a better learning curve, but it would mean SubLems would not be available for a longer time.
Question 3: What advice can you give a relatively amateur Lemmings level designer. Plenty of my levels are lacking in the scenery department, and most of my levels are quite small.
Question 4: Are any of my difficulty names used by other packs? If so, I have some backup names.

1. Several packs have done this without problem. It may be best to stick to older stuff, and in particular, avoid full versions of commercial music (instead sticking to re-created instrumentals, video game music, etc). If you meant in terms of forum rules, no, we don't outright forbid it.

2. This is entirely something you have to decide on yourself. In a couple of cases, I've set myself higher targets then ended up reducing the count later (Lemmings Plus III, and the now-withdrawn Doomsday Lemmings II). Note that it's also fine to have a different number of levels in each rank; several packs have done so.

3. For scenery, the official games actually do a very good job of this most of the time, so take some inspiration from them. Do remember to be careful that your decoration doesn't add backroutes (on the other hand, one thing that has been done in the past is making stuff look like scenery when it's part of the solution, or vice versa). Small levels are fine, and are often preferred; making hard levels that remain high in quality is a difficult task, and out of the packs I've played, the only author who seems to be able to consistently make levels that are large, but still very good, is IchoTolot. As Icho mentioned, reading through Level Design is a good idea; if you didn't want to do that for now (or at all), some general tips are:
- Don't have time limits unless it's either (a) to prevent backroutes, or (b) the main source (or one of the main sources) of the level's difficulty. If the level is already challenging without a time limit, and a time limit isn't needed to prevent backroutes, do not add a time limit. This is especially true for larger levels. This also, to some extent, applies to "pseudo-time limits" as well, such as having to rush to build a splatform; yes, splatform levels can be very genius indeed, but either some leeway should be given, or the level should be set up such that if the right path is found, the timing will always work out correctly.
- Avoid designs that could be thought of as "several levels packed into one". If there are seperate parts, then these parts should have to work together, or how to divide the skills between them should be a major part of the puzzle, or something like that.
- Avoid misleading designs. If it looks like steel, it should be steel. If it doesn't look like steel, it shouldn't be steel. If you've placed a trap, make it visible, or at least hint at its presence, if possible. Don't hide exits under terrain - and even more so, do not have a visible exit that's impossible to get to, with a second exit hidden in terrain.
- Since you're designing for SuperLemmini, avoid needing precise or hard-to-judge moves as much as possible. In NeoLemmix and Lix, this doesn't matter so much because if the player makes a mistake, they can just use backwards frameskips or save states to go back and correct it, and can use framestepping to help assign at the correct position. SuperLemmini has no such mechanic; even though it does have replay, this is still very time consuming, and depending on how precise the assignment has to be, it may be almost trial and error trying to get it right. (In general, I'm not sure how great an idea it is to use SuperLemmini. I'm not overly fond of it myself, and I think it's likely there's a reason why, despite having been around for about as long as NeoLemmix has, it has only a tiny fraction of the amount of content NL does.)
- The number one guideline to keep in mind though is that all guidelines are recommendations, not rules. If breaking them results in a better level, or thematic concerns contradict the guidelines, break them.

Since SuperLemmini doen't have much content, there aren't really any "conventions" for it yet, other than the general level design ones.

4. Don't worry about it. I'd recommend, avoid re-using ones from the official games (unless you're completely copying a set of them - ie: if your ranks are "Fun", "Tricky", "Taxing", "Mayhem" that's probably okay, but don't randomly have one called "Mayhem" among several original names), and avoid re-using ones that you yourself have used in other packs. Don't worry so much if someone else may already have used it; since otherwise it becomes a game of "first in, first served". With that being said, you may, however, if you discover one of your names has been used, check whether your usage of it is quite different to the other person's, to avoid confusing people. If one person uses "Wacky" for a Tame-like rank, you may want to not use it for your Havoc-like rank. But at the end of the day, what people are interested in most is your levels, not your rank names.

[Colorful Arty]

Thanks for all of the advice guys! I really appreciate you taking the time to help me out, and thank you so much for being so welcoming!

I think I will stick to the 20 levels per difficulty, since I have found a few that either I am not too fond of, or I have found a better way to implement the solution, so I can implement all of my new ideas just fine.

I'm guessing when SubLems gets released, plenty of the levels (especially the Hellish levels) will have tons of backroutes. I'm alright with backroutes as long as they don't completely ruin the level. I usually make a level with a specific trick you will need to beat it, so if the backroute gets around that trick, I try to block it up, so be on the lookout for those.

One thing I need to discuss is the use of glitches. For me personally, I'm fine with using glitches as long as the glitch can be logically deduced or if it is a well-known glitch. (As well as the glitch being pretty much the whole level) The glitches I do not like are the ones that cannot be found unless you are actively trying to find glitches. (A good example of this is the final One level from Pimolems "There's Rashness in the method". I have no idea how you would figure that glitch out) Right now, many of the Hellish levels require either glitches or odd lemming behavior, but nothing I consider unfair.

I will stick with the difficulty names I have, I have grown rather attached to them. My main problem  right now is trying to make Sweet levels that are not boring to play. To solve that, most Sweet levels are either really short and/or look awesome. Most Sweet levels were me just like "I'm going to make a level that looks like a piece of cake!" That has worked out well, but I still have about two levels to make and I am currently at a creative block for those, so I'm basically fine-tuning previous levels (especially the Newbie levels, which were environmentally bland) for the time being.

Two more questions:

Question 1: What is the general opinion on SuperLemming levels? I only have one in my pack, but it is a lengthy level.

Question 2: What do people think of repeat levels? I personally love playing levels from earlier difficulties again with a new challenge, so I have quite a few of them, but at what point do the repeat levels get exhaustive?

And here's another screenshot!


First level of Insane: "What an AMERICAN level!"

I'm from America, can you tell?

[namida]

One thing I need to discuss is the use of glitches. For me personally, I'm fine with using glitches as long as the glitch can be logically deduced or if it is a well-known glitch.

If you're wanting to make use of glitches, I highly recommend considering using Lemmix or Lemmini rather than SuperLemmini. Although updates on SuperLemmini are slow, the creator has indicated that he does intend to continue working on it, so any glitches that come to light will most likely be fixed, thus breaking your levels. This is even more true for NeoLemmix and Lix, which are very actively updated. On the other hand, Lemmix by definition should never change its behaviour (as it has an exact specification: Lemmix's behaviour should match that of DOS Lemmings), and Lemmini has not been updated in a very long time and probably never will be again. Ultimately though, levels relying on glitches are probably not a great idea; they very much push into the same "unfair" territory as fake steel, etc.

Question 1: What is the general opinion on SuperLemming levels? I only have one in my pack, but it is a lengthy level.

When combined with the general thing of SuperLemmini not offering much in the way of frame-by-frame control, SuperLemming goes completely against the "avoid overly-precise or hard-to-position assignments" guideline. On the flipside, in engines that do have such frame-by-frame control, SuperLemming doesn't really make any difference. So there generally isn't too much reason to use it.

Question 2: What do people think of repeat levels? I personally love playing levels from earlier difficulties again with a new challenge, so I have quite a few of them, but at what point do the repeat levels get exhaustive?

If you want to make a large pack, and have the difficulty range from "easy" to "hard", rather than "hard" to "even harder", they're a very useful way to fill up the easier ranks without wasting level designs that could be used to make hard levels. Only two of my packs contain repeats to any significant degree (Lemmings Plus I and Lemmings Plus Omega); in these, almost every level in the first rank or two has a repeat later on. However, some people have indicated a dislike of them. At least one person has suggested that they're boring when the earlier version is just a 20-of-everything worker lemming level, but can be interesting if they result in two fairly different, but not nessecerially obvious, solutions to the same level layout.

[Simon]

The screenshots look excellent! Good luck pushing your pack to completion.

Many design guidelines boil down to keeping the game a puzzle. It should not be an action game, or a guessing game. An ideal player shall find the solution by pure observation and deduction. Execution is merely a means to prove our solution to the computer.

Releasing is more important than conforming to guidelines. Your good taste will guide the way, and you'll get feedback from eager players.

-- Simon

[ccexplore]

Question 1: What is the general opinion on SuperLemming levels? I only have one in my pack, but it is a lengthy level.

I'm definitely not a fan of the one SuperLemming level in the official Oh No More Lemmings game.  It adds nothing but a silly pointless gimmick to the game.  Since you can pause to think and to prepare for skill assignments, the speed is rather superfluous on that level even in terms of how it affects execution of the solution.  There was also nothing about that level that feels fast or frantic aside from the gimmick itself (indeed, there's quite a bit of walking in places), so I can't even say it adds much to the atmosphere or mood.  And had the level involve more unforgiving precise moves it would just make things more annoying.  It is arguably IMO the most pointless gimmick in the entire series of the game that are based on the original physics (ie. everything before Lemmings 2), and its one debut completely wasted even the tiny bit of potential it could've offered.  The best thing I can say about it is that it is the closest thing to a fast-forward feature that is sorely missing in the official games before Lemmings 2.

If you do choose to use it, use it sparingly and try not to repeat the issues I pointed out above, if actually possible.

[Proxima]

The biggest problem with levels dependent on glitches is that they get in the way of adapting your levels for the other engines, for the benefit of players who don't have (Super)Lemmini. Both NeoLemmix and Lix have gotten rid of all the glitches the community has found in original Lemmings -- for reference, here is a list of glitches in Lemmings and a list of non-glitch tricks. While the dividing line isn't always clear, the majority of non-glitch tricks are common across all platforms. (This is not true for all; some don't work due to slight differences in the mechanics, and some were deliberately excluded, e.g. removal of basher staircases in Lix.)

In addition, glitches have to be treated carefully because many players find them unfair. A glitch that's "well-known" to the present community won't be known to any new players who come along. They will look at the level as a standard puzzle, asking them to solve it with the mechanics they are familiar with, and after a long time of trying and getting nowhere, might realise that the level expects them to know or work out a glitch. You say you're okay with glitches if they can be "logically deduced", but what is the standard for that? Suppose someone builds a level the same as Tricky 28 (Lost something?) but with no skills except builders. It can logically be deduced that there is some way to use builders to glitch into the exit, but how much does that help the player who doesn't know how the glitch works?

I'm very fond of repeat levels, and use them a lot myself. Contrary to Akseli (whose opinion namida quoted), I think it's fine to have a 20-of-everything level and then repeat it for a puzzle. Original Lemmings soured a few people towards repeat levels, because many of its levels aren't so much puzzles as challenges, and all the repeat does is give you the same challenge with fewer skills and a tighter save requirement. Levels with two different puzzles in the same terrain also have a lot of potential, and because of the difficulty of construction, I often find them to be artistic achievements.

Just don't give us another We All Fall Down  8)

[Nepster]

I am a bit late to the party, but anyway:

Question 3: What advice can you give a relatively amateur Lemmings level designer. Plenty of my levels are lacking in the scenery department, and most of my levels are quite small.

As already mentioned above: Small levels are usually better liked than huge ones (with exceptions that prove the rule). So I can only recommend avoiding making a level bigger, if the only point is to have a bigger level.
Regarding visual design: They already look excellent and much better than many of the levels I see elsewhere ! But if you need some inspirations, look at levels of various other level designers. In the Lemmix/Lemmini database you can directly view small preview images without having to download the level packs. The quality is very mixed, but sometimes one finds gems like Eymerich's "Dungeon & Lemmings"  or Akseli's "Zygoptera". The recent levels by GigaLem have excellent visuals as well, though apart from the preview images posted here in various topics, you need to get NeoLemmix and actually play all his levels to see them.

Regarding hidden exits like in your Boss level: My advice is to use them very sparingly, because they easily become incredibly annoying (e.g. if only a very restricted skillset is available, if the exit is hidden in some obscure place in the scenery, ... - and yes, all this was already tried long ago!). Some people (like me) even skip such level completely.

One thing I need to discuss is the use of glitches. For me personally, I'm fine with using glitches as long as the glitch can be logically deduced or if it is a well-known glitch. (As well as the glitch being pretty much the whole level) The glitches I do not like are the ones that cannot be found unless you are actively trying to find glitches. (A good example of this is the final One level from Pimolems "There's Rashness in the method". I have no idea how you would figure that glitch out) Right now, many of the Hellish levels require either glitches or odd lemming behavior, but nothing I consider unfair.

The line between glitches and just obscure lemming behavior is very thin:
Take for example stopping miners by assigning a blocker, while the miner is mid-air (PS: I don't know, if this is still possible in SuperLemmini). Among the lemmings community this is a rather well-known glitch (or weird game mechanics). However when I first encountered a level requiring this, I was stumped for a few days (spending several hours each, trying to solve the level). Finally I looked up the intended solution. But I can tell you: This was not fun! Moreover having played the original lemming games before, this new behavior was completely unexpected!
On the other hand, there is stuff like basher and miner-staircases (again not sure whether they are still possible in SuperLemmini): The player has already seen that the terrain gets removed sequentially in lots of other levels. So one can be pretty confident that players already are aware of all required game mechanics to find this trick.
Upshot is: If the player has already seen the behavior before, though perhaps hasn't yet realized that one can use it for other purposes as well, then the behavior is likely fine. If the behavior is not even remotely possible in the original lemmings, I would be very careful and likely add a level, where the player more or less automatically stumbles over the trick (e.g. 1 lemming, 1 miner, 1 blocker and as the only obstruction is a thin pillar on an otherwise completely flat level). The same goes for "well-known" glitches: Hopefully your level pack will eventually be played by new players, and I am fairly sure you don't want to frustrate them by using well-known glitches they are unaware of .

New Question 2: What do people think of repeat levels? I personally love playing levels from earlier difficulties again with a new challenge, so I have quite a few of them, but at what point do the repeat levels get exhaustive?

With repeat levels, you have to ask yourself: How likely is the player to find a solution to the first level, that works in the same way for the repeat? How likely is finding such a solution, if players try to save all lemming already on the easy version (as some people play like that)?
If both situations are unlikely, then the repeat is an interesting level on its own and should be included. If it is likely that players will use the same solutions for both levels (e.g. "The Crossroads" or "Have a nice day!" from L1), then the repeat is just annoying for the player.

[Colorful Arty]

Thanks for all of the feedback guys!

Since it seems most people are not fond of glitches, I will most likely remove them from the final pack (with maybe a few exceptions that I have grown fond of). I have also removed the SuperLemming level (which I was not fond of myself) as well as adjusting some levels that required too much walking bombing.

A few of my levels involve tricks that are kind of at the brink of glitch vs. simply unusual tricks involving tasks. Those levels I want to stay in, because they are pretty spectacular.

I'm glad people tend to prefer short levels to long ones. I was wondering about that because I can beat several Hellish levels in a matter of minutes due to my knowing the solution, and I don't want to have people feel ripped off by my levels being so small.

I do have a few levels that make full use of the full screen, and I do mean full use. I find it is difficult to create a large level that is fun, challenging, and not boring without making multiple entry hatches. Quite a few levels have 8 entry hatches.

One of the challenges of SubLems, is I'm trying to have a more or less equal number of levels from each tileset. The brick, marble, fire, crystal, and pillar tilesets are all really easy to work with, while I find the dirt and bubble sets are the hardest. (The dirt due to it having practically no pieces of terrain that aren't lumpy or uneven, and the bubble because most pieces are tiny and if you don't stack the pieces right, it looks horrible). I'm trying to make sure each difficulty has at least two levels from each tileset.

Does anyone know how to give a SuperLemmini level a black background as opposed to the dark blue background? I prefer the black one. (I know it is possible, since several original Lemmings levels in SuperLemmini had black backgrounds)

[namida]

I do have a few levels that make full use of the full screen, and I do mean full use.

Since SuperLemmini hasn't had much content made, there are no real "conventions" as such, as I mentioned earlier. However, in this regard, I might suggest referring to a convention of NeoLemmix design that's also applicable to SuperLemmini - 8. Avoid unused space on the sides of levels.

NeoLemmix, SuperLemmini and Lix all allow you to resize your levels, rather than sticking to a fixed size like in DOS / Lemmix (1584x160) and Lemmini (3200x320). You likely have already made some levels that center the level in a large playing area; NeoLemmix Editor (which, as far as I know, is the only editor with dedicated SuperLemmini support, rather than "it supports Lemmini, and SuperLemmini can load Lemmini levels") has a "Shift Level" option that is useful in removing unused space in such cases. If you need help with setting up or using it, feel free to make a topic on the NeoLemmix board to ask, or pop onto the #neolemmix IRC channel on Quakenet.

[ccexplore]

Take for example stopping miners by assigning a blocker, while the miner is mid-air (PS: I don't know, if this is still possible in SuperLemmini). Among the lemmings community this is a rather well-known glitch (or weird game mechanics). However when I first encountered a level requiring this, I was stumped for a few days (spending several hours each, trying to solve the level). Finally I looked up the intended solution. But I can tell you: This was not fun! Moreover having played the original lemming games before, this new behavior was completely unexpected!

The original game has some levels that require freeing a blocker by removing the ground it is standing on.  So if the move truly is purely about assigning blocker to the miner in mid-air, I think people who have completed the original game will have a good idea what will happen.  But except for the side effects of a different miner glitch explained below, under the game mechanics of the original games (so maybe slightly different for Lemmini), for the miner to end up mid-air without simply falling on its own, some other lemming would need to be removing the ground it is standing on, and it can be rather difficult to enforce a setup where that happens but the miner doesn't just fall later by itself anyway.

So more likely, the real glitch involved (since I don't know the specific level since you didn't say) has to do with the way the game calculates the lemming's position while mining, causing it to sometimes be treated as in mid-air even though it doesn't look like it (and wouldn't have been mid-air if the calculated position more accurately reflects the visible position of the lemming).  This definitely falls into unfair territory, and is likely not portable across engines (eg. I don't even know if NeoLemmix still retain this behavior).

==============

Regarding repeat levels:  I believe in interviews with Mike Dailly (one of the DMA folks that worked on the game), it was confirmed that the repeats were done basically to pad out the game on the earlier difficulty ratings--usually the "hard" version of the level was created first, and then later they started to realize they have too many hard levels and not enough easy ones, and so one quick way to address this was to reuse the hard levels in an easier rating, adjusting skills, time and save requirements to make the level easier.

Repeating levels was never a core part or theme of the game, as evidence by the lack of repeat levels in any of the later games in the franchise.  But as people said, it can still be interesting to repeat in your own sets provided that you don't actually just repeat the same overall solution between the earlier and later occurrence of the level.

[Colorful Arty]

Hey, everybody! I hope you all had a great Easter!

In recent news, I have gone on a purge of all levels in SubLems that I deemed "not good enough" for the final product. The levels were rejected for various reasons, usually because they were bland, too long, required crazy glitches, could be implemented better, etc.

Don't be worried though, I've had a few really good ideas for levels that I have not seen anyone implement before, so they should be pretty awesome to play. (They're rather pretty as well)

I have about 10 levels to create for the game now, as well as polishing existing levels, setting the perfect music, and testing for optimal release rate and eliminating massive backroutes.

I'll try to keep updating this page regularly to let you guys know how progress is going.

Also, I'm not showing any more screenshots of the actual game, because I don't want to spoil too many levels, so instead, I'll post screenshots of the levels that have been rejected (some of them are still quite pretty)


An old Sweet level: "The ruins of old Constantinople" The architecture was good, but it was a little too long in my opinion. (This was a 20 of each skill level)





And it's Chaotic sequel: "Istanbul (not Constantinople)" I loved the name, concept, and how you played on the other half of the level, but like its predecessor, it was too long, required a bit too much precision for its length, I managed to implement the solution better in a different level, and I didn't like the idea of playing a song with lyrics on a Lemmings level. (Guess which song played in the background). The solution required one lemming to build to the exit, and use a single miner to save the rest. (Mining through a bridge was required.)