"Lemmings Redux": A "remake" of official games for NeoLemmix.

[Proxima]

Now that I've more time to think about the ordering of levels, I don't think the "shortage of easy levels" is nearly as bad as I at first assumed -- certainly not bad enough to justify keeping all or even half of the Tame levels. Surely we don't want to put new players through that yawnfest. The Fun levels present genuine challenges to overcome, so that the player feels they are building on the skills they learned in the tutorials, whereas if you can pass Tame 1 you can pass the whole set.

I would argue for keeping the special levels in the same spirit as they were originally intended -- a once per rank "just for fun" level. Doesn't matter that they don't fit the difficulty curve -- the odd breather level is much less of a problem than abrupt difficulty spikes.

Here's a draft order for a redux Fun set, to show that it could work with only a small number of Tame levels:

Training levels -- Either keep as they are, or, for a repeats-free pack, replace Fun 2, 4, 7 with 2P Level 33, Tame 11, Tame 8, and give those levels the skillsets and titles of the training levels they replace.

8 - Tame 1
9 - Adapt two-player level "The Pipe Room" (or Tame 5)
10 - Tame 4
11 - Fun 11
12 - Tame 7
13 - Highland Fling with 20 of all
14 - Go for it!
15 - Bridge Away!
16 - Tricky 3
17 - PSP 10 (Just 17)
18 - Fun 18
19 - Genesis Fun 19 (Catch more floaters)
20 - PSP 9 (Pillar talking)
21 - Through the graveyard
22 - A beast of a level
23 - Flow Control, remove red herring skills and have more lems to allow more leeway
24 - PSP 14 (Tunnel vision)
25 - Fun 25
26 - PSP 18 (The run around)
27 - Natural life
28 - PSP 20 (Lemming toast)
29 - Genesis Fun 29 (Dark dawn)
30 - Let me get out of here (of course, we should fix the pun: Lemmy get out of here)

...then there are quite a lot of levels on the late Fun / early Tricky boundary, so it would be easy to fill the set up if we decide on 40 per rank.

[607]

I'm a fan of the repeat levels myself, as long as they actually need a different solution instead of just more precision or time-management.
I don't get why you'd want to remove repeat levels but keep Tame levels. Surely, the solution matters more than the lay-out. See, the Tame levels just aren't interesting. Nearly all of them are virtually the same as any other Tame level.
I like the list Proxima compiled.
I don't think most of the Holiday Lemmings levels are too interesting, and that'd be the reason for excluding them. I don't mind the graphic set.
In this set, will the decoration that doesn't influence the solution be removed, like I think was done in the NeoLemmix Lemmings pack that was released before?

[Minim]

I agree with Proxima's list for the earlier levels. I like that creative idea of doing 20 of each skill for Highland Fling.

I just had an idea as for where to order most of the trickier levels:

The levels with just one skill (e.g. King of the castle, Take a running jump) can go near the 'start', which is roughly halfway across the whole set. Then as the levels progress the number of types of skills increase. So the last level would probably be something like "It's hero time", where all eight skills are available.

Although on second thought, if I apply this trick to all the Taxing and Mayhem levels, then levels like "How do I dig up the way" and "Watch out, there's traps about", two easy Taxing levels because of plentiful supplies, would also end up near the end of the set. Maybe I should look at the Lemmings level spreadsheet to help me out.

[namida]

Difficulty is a subjective matter, and so ordering will need to be based off feedback and consensus, rather than attempting to define it by any kind of objective criteria.

In regards to decorative terrain, excluding any possible backroute fixes (which we'll save for much later) and the switch to not use the Genesis versions of graphic sets even on Genesis-origin levels, the layouts will be identical to as seen in the existing NXPs of the games.

I think adapting 2-player levels is going too far (but if other people disagree, I can reconsider). I think we should aim to, unless there's a really good purpose to it, use only existing levels as much as possible.

A once-per-rank just for fun use of the special graphics levels is plausible, provided we stick to 5 ranks (plus a training rank, perhaps).

In regards to the Tame levels being "boring" - I'd like to ask, does there happen to be anyone here who played ONML before original Lemmings? If so, did you indeed find the Tame levels boring?

[mobius]

I attempted this on my own a long time ago but only ever made a spreadsheet about it. So you can look at this spreadsheet as my personal thoughts and opinions on this.* It's incomplete but I re-ordered some levels by difficulty and removed all the levels I didn't like.

I really liked the Genesis remakes of the ONML levels, I think the decoration on those looks better than the originals imo. I also think they picked some of the best or most memorable levels from ONML. Not many others stand out in my mind, except;
Madness in the Method
Flow Control
AAAAARRRG
This Corrosion

probably nobody cares but a while ago, for some reason I remade these levels in the Original graphics. Unfortunate I can't find them at the moment...

On training levels; I like the idea of having more than the just 8 levels for the 8 skills but other levels maybe demonstrating things like make a builder wall and turning miners etc. But this depends on what other kinds of levels are in the later part of the pack.

I strongly recommend only having 1 WAFD. the rest seem totally redundent and tedious imo. Some levels like "I am AT" were annoying on the Genesis, but I just played this level on NEoLemmix the other day and found it was not nearly as aggravating, of course I did know what to do. Perhaps you may want to ease the difficulty of that level slightly. I have "Private Room available" in that spreadsheet but I'm not strongly in favor of that level, unless it's altered; it could be awesome. It's a really nice concept imo, just flawed because of difficulty of execution.

*I didn't make this from scratch, I altered finlay's level list.

[607]

In regards to decorative terrain, excluding any possible backroute fixes (which we'll save for much later) and the switch to not use the Genesis versions of graphic sets even on Genesis-origin levels, the layouts will be identical to as seen in the existing NXPs of the games.

And that means? I don't get what you mean by the existing NXPs. Was any decoration removed, there?

[Minim]

Difficulty is a subjective matter, and so ordering will need to be based off feedback and consensus, rather than attempting to define it by any kind of objective criteria.

In regards to the Tame levels being "boring" - I'd like to ask, does there happen to be anyone here who played ONML before original Lemmings? If so, did you indeed find the Tame levels boring?

Not sure how much help this is considering that we're using so many levels, but I just found one of Proxima's old posts suggesting a level order for ONML here. He also mentions ten of the least interesting Tame levels to solve, and replaces them with some of the easiest levels in the proper difficulty ranks.

I think we should exclude all the 2P Levels unless there is some kind of unique feature or method to them.

In regards to repeated levels, I'd keep the first and third "Just A Minute" levels because of different level graphics (also, the second is not as much fun as the first because of less terrain) and keep the third WAFD level (60 lemmings). Obviously WAFD is quite tedious, but do we want fewer lemmings or a bigger challenge? I'd say 60 lemmings is just right in terms of difficulty and tedium.

[namida]

I'm going to put polls up in regards to some of these questions, as this gives a clearer idea of how people feel about things (and takes away the pressure one might feel of having to explain why).

First one is in regards to whether or not to include Holiday Lemmings. Please be aware that I've deliberately decided not to have any inbetween option of "have a few of them only". If we're going to include them at all, they should be given the same regard as levels from any other game (and what exactly that is will be decided later; the point here is simply that Holiday won't be treated any differently if it does get included).

[Proxima]

I voted "Yes" to Holiday because I think we should do exactly that -- keep them on the list for consideration, decide which to remove, which will mean removing almost all the Holiday levels, but there are a couple of good ones in there that we could use.

However, I don't feel strongly about it. Removing them all would certainly save a bit of time and effort.

[namida]

Seems people do want Holiday to be included, so I guess Holiday Lemmings is eligible too.

So, onto the next question - repeats! I've put up three options:

a) Don't take repeat status into account. Judge each level individually, regardless of whether it has / is a repeat or not, and regardless of whether its alternative versions made it in (obviously cases where they're virtually identical, such as WAFD or Fun 18 / Taxing 19 would be exceptions).
b) Allow them but only in exceptional cases, such as where one version is a training level. This is my preferred option.
c) No repeats at all. This will likely mean we can't have training levels, as otherwise it'd mean having to cut out some excellent levels such as Postcard From Lemmingland and No Added Colors Or Lemmings.

[Proxima]

This will likely mean we can't have training levels, as otherwise it'd mean having to cut out some excellent levels such as Postcard From Lemmingland and No Added Colors Or Lemmings.

See my post at the top of the page for a suggestion as to how we could keep training levels, and keep Postcard and No Added Colors, without using repeats.

Still, I've voted for (b) because I think there are some exceptional cases where we should keep both of a repeat pair -- the clearest example is Fall and No Life and its repeat, which are both among the very best puzzles in the game.

But in general, I've now changed my original view and I think we should get rid of repeats wherever possible. This is because most repeats in the original game were created to fill the lack of easy levels -- but now that we have Covox, Prima, PSP and the possibility of using a small number of levels from Tame and Holiday, we just don't need those repeats any more. (Again, see my earlier post for an example of how this could be done.) For training levels, I think it's more interesting to use a different layout, so that one more unique layout is present in the game.

I think the only circumstances in which two repeats should both be kept are if (1) they are both good puzzles in their own right; (2) the harder one is a good puzzle and the easier one is a good 20-of-everything that's fun to play around with and the level set definitely loses something by omitting it. Now, it's entirely possible that some levels I've omitted in my draft ordering fall under category (2) and should be retained. That's something we can discuss later when we decide which specific levels to retain and how to order them.

[namida]

It seems once again, the polling is almost entirely in favor of one option - the "Generally disallow, but make exceptions where there's a very good reason" one.

So next question... how inclusive should we be in general?

a) Include every eligible level. We only exclude levels when doing so under the "generally avoid repeats" guideline.
b) Include the majority of eligible levels, but remove some of the less interesting ones. (Levels like "Hunt The Nessy" come to mind here.)
c) Be very selective. Decide which levels to include essentially on a level-by-level basis.

[Proxima]

As I've already implied, I am strongly in favour of (c).

With Holiday and the possibility of keeping some repeats, we have around 400 eligible levels. That is a lot to play through, and contains a lot of levels that, solution-wise, are not very different from each other. I think new players would be much more impressed with the game if we gave them a highly selective pack and they rose up the difficulty ranks more quickly. The Covox, Prima, PSP and Holiday packs contain some good levels, but an awful lot of dross. ONML and Genesis are higher-quality in general, but still have so many levels that the designers ran out of ideas and threw in a few duffs.

Honestly, I think a sensible target would be to aim for 5 x 40 levels, around half of the total.

[RubiX]

My opinion would be a  'Greatest Hits'  volume

The absolute most fun / best puzzles from all the retail lemmings games.
We've had threads about favorite maps etc in the past, lets just put the best of the best into its own game.

[Flopsy]

Proxima makes a good point about there being a lot of duff levels, not having a vast knowledge of Genesis Lemmings I still know there are some not so good levels in that.

There were some great levels in the PSP Special rank aswell, like "No Justice for the Hero" - tough level to solve when you first see it. I mean the PSP remake has not produced very fun levels in general but some of the tougher levels were pure gems I thought.

An aim for 5 ranks of 40 levels each seem appropriate, how we'll reach that I do not know