Level Design: What Makes A Level Challenging?

[Nepster]

The jumper certainly would be much higher on my priority list than timed exploders , so we seem to have common ground there. If I understood it correctly, the issue with the jumper is that knockback is needed? I saw that Lix has knockback, and so has Lemmings 2.

Despite what Proxima says, jumpers might be doable without tumbler physics, if they fall stright down after a while or when they hit the ceiling.
More problematic is the testing, that it works as intended in all terrain circumstances and interacting with all terrain layouts. Over the time we have weeded out about a dozen builder glitches, and the builder consists only of two different lemming actions per cycle and three different types of terrain checks. The jumper would need a lot more, which just yields much more space where glitches may hide.

I am however always in favour of skills that "fill gaps", by doing things no other skill can, but might be needed frequently. [...] Laser Blaster [...]

I already replied concerning the pourer skills and the laser blaster in the other thread. If you have further input concerning these skills, please post it there. It's easier for everyone (and especially namida and myself) if all the discussion about adding L2 skills to NeoLemmix is in one place.

Something that never occured on any Lemmings game is a downward builder (unless we want to count the roper). Upward digging and downward building are pretty much the only "gaps" remaining; apart from that, lemmings can both create and destroy into any direction.

This suggestion came up already, too, but I cannot find the thread at the moment. IIRC the conclusion was, that this may sound like something that is missing, but actually almost all levels ideas for them work equally well with platformers if you modify the terrain slightly.

Excellent point! I just realized that the current version lacks blueprints for lemmings walking through Radiation or Slowfreeze objects!

I'd certainly prefer that over throwing them out entirely, as IchoTolot suggested .

I totally agree with you here. But as namida has the most levels containing these objects, he has to make the decision to cull them.

However, I'm only somewhat familiar with Python so far, so unless NeoLemmix is based on that, this will certainly be more of a long-term thing .

No, NeoLemmix is written in Delphi (because its code is based on the Lemmix code, which was already in Delphi). The main problem with Delphi is the expensive IDE and compiler. PM namida if you need further input concerning the Delphi IDEs.
Lix is written in D, which has free IDEs and compilers, but Simon has an extremely object-oriented programming style which may be hard to read if you are only used to the precedural style common to short Python scripts.

[Proxima]

This suggestion came up already, too, but I cannot find the thread at the moment. IIRC the conclusion was, that this may sound like something that is missing, but actually almost all levels ideas for them work equally well with platformers if you modify the terrain slightly.

It's the thread where Namida first proposed adding the fencer.

[namida]

The jumper certainly would be much higher on my priority list than timed exploders , so we seem to have common ground there. If I understood it correctly, the issue with the jumper is that knockback is needed? I saw that Lix has knockback, and so has Lemmings 2.

Yes, the main problem with jumpers is that you have to have tumbler physics to deal with all the cases where the jump doesn't go as expected

Disagree. Lix chose to introduce a new Tumbler state for jumpers to transition to. NeoLemmix could instead opt for the alternative option of simply having them become a faller when the jump ends.

NeoLemmix also already has the Glider, which a "Tumbler" would probably share many similarities with. The glider has been debugged very intensively, so more or less reusing its code could achieve the desired effect.