Prince Jamie's Super Challenge Pack Set 3 Discussion

[Prince Jamie]

Choose wisely, as the choice with the most votes will have this special Level appear on chosen Rating, when the voting ends March 1st:

Risk: Lotus Turbo Challenge 2
Sacrifice: Micro Machines
Small Collab: Sonic The Hedgehog
Big Collab: Pac Man

A new tileset will also be introduced, no matter which choice:

Flash:
1 Lemming must sacrifice himself to reveal the hidden shape, showing the right way to the exit.

[Prince Jamie]

So as I Mentioned, I'm going to introduce some new tilesets in "Prince Jamie's Super Challenge Pack Set 3", starting with "Flash".

The "Flash" will involve a similar mechanic from Lemmings touch, where 1 Lemming has to sacrifice himself to help the rest by activating a switch to open a door, this one is different however:
When a Lemming presses the trigger, he WILL die, but you'll see a clue telling you where the exit is, so remember it well.

I'm introducing a new Trap, as part of an Illusion level:
"Nothing is at it seems and you must solve the level a whole new way"
But I'm still thinking if this "Illusion" level might be this mechanic in a normal tileset, or a new tileset, I'm still thinking about that.

Here is a simple repeat animation of the trap, who will appear on my "Illusion" Level:

For those of you that don't know, that's Terrormisu, the final boss from "Wario Master of Disguise" and I will show her trap animation later, but here is a full description of it in the meantime:
A Lemming will stop and look at Terrormisu, until her real face is shown. This scares the Lemming so bad, that he explodes! After that, Terrormisu puts her cute face back on to fool the next Lemming who comes near her.

[IchoTolot]

...you'll see a clue telling you where the exit is, so remember it well.

I'm introducing a new Trap, as part of an Illusion level:
"Nothing is at it seems and you must solve the level a whole new way, along with Steel being breakable and more!"
But I'm still thinking if this "Illusion" level might be this mechanic in a normal tileset, or a new tileset, I'm still thinking about that.

Then I will 100% not play these levels! Icho's maximum capability for bearing hidden things in levels (especially in SuperLemmini) has been reached.

A level designer should not make a fool out of the player and screw him over with hidden exits/traps, unfair steel areas and invisible terrain! For the last thing pointing at your invisible level where I had to manually change the background color to be able to see anything in the recording.

In NeoLemmix this would be compensated for a bit by rewind options and clear physics mode, but I still would criticise the author to make him change it into a more honest level. In SuperLemmini this means a whole restart when the error is not bearable + replay watching in horribly slow fast forward over and over again for eternity.

Let's take level 12 in your last pack. My walkthrough with commentary titled "Prince Jamie's Super Challenge Pack or IchoTolot rages about SuperLemmini" will be uploaded to my Youtube channel after MegSEBytes so you will be able to see my live reactions.
Through opening the level directly in the NeoLemmix editor, I don't know if it was SuperLemmini or you who made my life hard. Still the result was unhonest steel which costed me ~ 45 min in combination with eternal SuperLemmini replay watching!
I got the tiny steel pieces playing in SuperLemmini in the middle and it looked like I could go in between them ---- that was not the case as there was a solid steel area the whole way through.
The editor showed me the vertical steel pieces who would have been correct. It could be that somehow SuperLemmini decided to suffle those ---- vertical to tiny, tiny to horizontal and horizontal to vertical.
In the end frustraition was the final result.

I hope I can finally get through to you and convince you that hidden exits/traps, unfair steel areas and invisible terrain are a bad way to make the players life hard, the puzzle itself should make him struggle!
At least a NeoLemmix conversion would give the player the option to rewind or activate "clear physics mode" to get some help dealing with this stuff.

I really want to help you, but deleting my critic or even the whole topic (I notice everything ) won't help you getting better and even more make people more reluctant to try out your stuff.

By the way another little advise ---- this post is saved on my harddrive so I don't really can recommend you to do the deleting process all over again.

[Prince Jamie]

"IchoTolot" Thank you for your feedback. I am also aware of the One Way Walls in the Terrain on "Challenge 12", I forgot to make them visible before releasing the pack, sorry about that.

Just so some of you know how Set 3 will start to turn out, I will include a couple of demo videos:
Terrormisu Trap in action
Flash Tileset in action + Clue
Keep in touch

[Colorful Arty]

To be fair Icho, some traps are designed to be hidden, like the boulder trap from the dirt graphic set. Especially in NeoLemmix, this is not a huge deal if traps are hidden, provided they aren't right at the end.

[IchoTolot]

To be fair Icho, some traps are designed to be hidden, like the boulder trap from the dirt graphic set. Especially in NeoLemmix, this is not a huge deal if traps are hidden, provided they aren't right at the end.

That's why I'd call even them badly designed traps to begin with (yes even the holy dirt tileset) + try to make their activation button as visible as possible.

As I said: In NeoLemmix I can see over those things more easily as I can detect them with clear physics mode or simply rewind on the fly, but still point out that they need to be more visible ---- but giving this is SuperLemmini I have no other option as to stress it here.... these things costed me added up hours of replay watching! They need to be visible. I need certaincy on what's steel, what's terrain and what's a trap.

[namida]

Okay. This post is being made as an administrator, not as a member of the community who happens to be admin.

Icho's response is not "trolling" or "hateful". That would be if he posted "your levels suck and you'll never make anything good". Instead, he's explained why he doesn't like this kind of level - and I think you'll find that most of the community agree with him here - and offered suggestions on what he thinks can be done to improve your levels. This doesn't mean you have to take that advice into account and change how you work; your levels are your levels and you can design them however you like. But it might be worth noting that Icho's pack "Lemmings Reunion" is one of the highest-regarded, maybe even the highest-regarded level pack in recent times, so it's probably safe to assume he knows what he's talking about here.

Please also avoid trying to act as a "mini-moderator". We have a huge ratio of mods / admins to regular users here, things will be sorted out soon enough if there really is a problem (which there wasn't in this case). Deleting your posts to censor someone else's reply is not on - in fact, I've now removed the option for users to delete their own topics because of this (you can still lock them if they become not in need of further discussion).

[namida]

Now, posting as just a regular user:

I agree with Icho 100% here. Hidden traps, fake steel, they were amusing during the early days when someone was the first person to come up with the idea, and back when designs that mislead you about what's what were considered a fair method of challenge. Nowdays, the majority of players find them annoying, and as Icho said, this is even more true when using an engine that doesn't allow manual rewinding (ie: Lemmini or SuperLemmini), or anything like clear physics mode that shows you in a clear way what's what (I'm not sure if even Lix has this feature yet, actually, though I'd imagine it won't be far away if they don't already have it).

Also, you mention wanting to be able to make a level where "one lemming sacrifices himself to unlock the exit", and you've come up with a very roundabout way of doing this - the implication I get is that there's a trap, and the trap animation reveals the hint. What stops the user from figuring out the hint, and restarting the level and reaching the exit without going via the trap? You should strongly consider switching to NeoLemmix; NL actually supports having buttons that unlock the exit. These buttons don't kill the lemming, but this is easily solved - place the button in an area the lemming can't get out of alive. (See Outrageous 11 "Relentless" from Lemmings Plus V for an example of this.) Not only this, but in general given the kind of designs you prefer making - while NL doesn't stop you from making them, and they're not likely to suddenly be loved just because they're on NL, at least - as Icho mentioned - NL will result in less frustration, because the user can simply rewind, or use Clear Physics Mode to see exactly what's what.

[Prince Jamie]

just so some of you know, none of my levels out of all my sets in "Prince Jamie's Super Challenge Pack" have included:
Fake/Unfair Steel
Completely Hidden traps (The staff hid them unfairly, such as Havoc 1)

I did mention that there will be an "Illusion" level in Set 3, where the solution looks simple, but It's not and you have to find a new way to solve the level in order to move on and it is THE ONLY level that will introduce my new Trap: Terrormisu(an animation of her is near the top of this topic). I'm thinking maybe a "Alice In Wonderland"-related theme, but I'm still deciding at the moment.

I did make an Illusion level years ago on one of my old packs, but I didn't like how it turned out and resulted into too much confusion, along with a Hidden exit.

I am also aware of this "NeoLemmix" that lots of people have been talking about, but I don't know how to use it...yet and I'm not starting to use this new engine, not after announcing "Prince Jamie's Super Challenge Pack Set 3" for SuperLemmini.

However, when I start Set 4, I'll take a look at "NeoLemmix" to see how these custom gimmicks such as these work:
Switches to Exit
Traps are only triggered once
Zombie Lemmings
and more...

Plus, if all my levels from my previous sets are supportive to convert, that would be swell

[namida]

NeoLemmix is pretty simple to use now, and there are plans to make it even simpler to use in the future.

I assume you're already using the NeoLemmix Editor to make your SuperLemmini levels? Either that or the regular Lemmix editor; either way, that makes you already pretty familiar with the level editor.

Graphic set creation is currently somewhat complicated. There are plans to greatly simplify this, but even currently it's easy enough that many people - even some who often struggle understanding new tools - have been able to create their graphic sets.

NeoLemmix supports almost every feature that SuperLemmini does (such as the one-way fields and vertical scrolling), except for invisible / fake terrain and putting terrain pieces "in the background" - the latter of which no known-to-us level editor supports anyway, even though SuperLemmini itself has a way to do so. Not only that, but there's also nine new skills to play around with (although one of them is not yet usable by the general public, since it's still a very recent addition and probably needs a bit more testing / improvement on its implementation). Pretty much the only disadvantage NL has compared to SuperLemmini that's both (a) significant and (b) unlikely to have anything done about it in the near future, is the lower-resolution graphics.

Converting content from (Super)Lemmini to NeoLemmix is fairly easy; IchoTolot has written a tutorial on it here: http://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=3002.0
If you need any help, just ask.

[Prince Jamie]

Between now and the first Half of February, I'll be showing you a few gimmicks I'll be adding to my "Illusion" level, along with development of the Terrormisu trap, so keep checking back.

My Gimmick is pretty much an Environment change you see in most video games, where you come to a certain area and you sometimes see something new there, that wasn't there before.

Examples(so you know what I'm talking about):
Starfy on Super Princess Peach
Different Pokemon on the Pokemon series
Flying Robot on Skylanders Imaginators Main M.A.P.
Weird Mushroom on Super Mario Maker
Golden Freddy on Five Nights at Freddy's

Fact: When I first got Lemmini back around 2007, I had a go at making my own objects and Terrain using Jasc Animation Shop. It worked for the Terrain, but for the objects, they were commonly invisible and didn't show all the time, so making new tilesets was a problem for me back then, until I came across Youtuber: Sonic8000. He told me that he used a program called "IrfanView" which prevented the object from becoming invisible on Lemmini and I owe it to him for making the "Egyptian Tileset" fully visible on Lemmini, he deserves most of the credit for that

That's where my "Environment change" gimmick will come in. Do not worry, it won't serve as a main purpose to the Set, just a fun little Easter egg

[Prince Jamie]

Here is a video demonstration on what the "Easter Egg Gimmick" will look like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw8h5injTow
Remember, pay attention to the girl in the picture frame on the video.

Remember, there's no need to worry, it won't serve as a main purpose to the Set, just a fun little Easter egg

If you wish to post Feedback, do it via reply please, Comments on the video are unavailable

Note: If anyone knows how to show this video on a forum instead of going to the page, please tell me how and I'll update the link

[IchoTolot]

Welp, Youtube blocked that video in my country so I cannot watch it.

Most likely you used a copyrighted music track in it. Maybe reconsider the music choice of the level to a copyright free track or to tracks nobody really cares about anymore.

[Prince Jamie]

I've checked the "Copyright notices" in my videos and it's not there. The only music that was playing was: Oh No! more Lemmings, so I don't know why it's doing that, I'll find another way to share it, maybe it's because I assigned it to "Private". I've changed it to "Unlisted" so hopefully, that should do it, if not, I don't know.

I've also posted it to "Lemmini Extras" on Facebook, look for it at the top of the page:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/lemminiextras/

[IchoTolot]

Now it's working. But I really don't know who that girl is.

I wouldn't call that a whole gimmick to be honest as it seems to not really affect the gameplay in any way. Maybe more like a tileset addon that adds some tiles refering to certain video game characters.