[NeoLemmix] Lemmings World Tour

[Strato Incendus]

The main pack is finished! Now all that's left to do is the remainder of the Groupie rank. Plus some music edits. Plus backroute testing .

Fortunately, GigaLem has made quite a bit of use of radiation in "Millas", so I can make that Hiroshima level which I have been struggling with for a while his signature level! ^^

I'll have to see whether 30 levels are enough to deal with every major pack creator here, or whether Groupie is going to need 40 levels, just like Encore.

So far there are levels in style of:
bulletride
Clam
Colorful Arty
Deceit
Dodochacalo
Duuddu
Flopsy
GigaLem
IchoTolot
mobius
namida
Nepster
Nessy
nin10doadict
Pieuw
Proxima
Raymanni
SQron
Wafflem
Yung Gotenks
zanzindorf

[Strato Incendus]

So... I'm kinda torn at this point. On the one hand, I'd really like to release this pack as soon as possible, and I don't want to blow it up to even more insane dimensions than it already is.

On the other hand, there are really a couple more places I'd like to visit with levels.

I just came up with these three, which wouldn't make it into the pack if it stuck to its 30-level-per-rank structure.


Cold Turkey

Yeah, I know that's not actually what this John Lennon song is about...


Burn

Could either be an Ellie Goulding- or a Deep Purple song.
This place is a little lesser known. But hey, it has the world's largest Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant!

The crescent on the Turkish flag was nasty to create, I had to use the dark red circles from the Marble tileset to be able to actually "carve" out a bit out of the white circle again. The "erase" takes away all terrain, after all, you can't work with multiple layers like that.

So this flag theoretically also would have required a crescent, but I just didn't bother here .


Weiße Rosen aus Athen

Another German title (ß can't be written in the Lemmings font, of course, so I used a double-s instead - insert Nazi joke here ).
But Nana Mouskouri recorded this song in a bunch of different languages, so you might know it nonetheless.

I did consider recolouring those flower traps to white for a while, in order to match the level title ("White Roses from Athens")... but they're more akin to tulips than roses anyway (hence, they also appear in "Tulpen aus Amsterdam", i.e. "Tulips from Amsterdam") .


Also, how about a level actually imitating a music video?


Seven Nation Army

Or... have you ever wondered what Lemming angels look like?


Engel

[Strato Incendus]

Yeah... looks like we're really going for 40 levels per rank now. I like my ranks to be even in level numbers whenever possible... Encore was bound to have 40 levels due to the sheer number of "song levels" I had already done in preceding packs; "Groupie" has 40 levels because there are a lot more different level creators out there than I thought; and the others are going to have 40 now as well, because there's still a lot more places to visit - and this type of level doesn't fit into any of the concepts for other packs I have in mind, so it's now or never!

At least I should have every major US city in here by now... well, every major city about which someone has made a song, that is .


Out of L.A.

Sadly, the skyline of L.A. is surprisingly repetitive - lots of blue, red-brown, or white-blue skyscrapers. They of course differ in detail, but that's a level of detail I can hardly replicate in Lemmings.
The solution is kinda cool, though; it is a builder fest, of course, as you can probably tell from the looks of it, but a builder fest where you have to think quite a bit, because timing is critical here.


Vegas Lights

Since Vegas copied the Eiffel tower from Paris, I did the same - i.e. copied it from the "Diggas in Paris" level. Plus, there's the big wheel and the fountain.


Shipping up to Boston

Now, as many of you have probably guessed by now, I'm mainly working with photos of the skyline to create these levels. In Boston's case, I've been there myself, and I recognised many of the buildings, but sadly, in low-detail Lemmings terrain, this city suffers from a similarly "repetitive" skyline as L.A. - just with a different flair, more brown and red tones instead of white and blue.


Streets of Philadelphia

C'mon, I can't do a rock music themed pack without a song by "The Boss" in here, can I? And if it's a song about a place on top of that, and a place I hadn't already covered with another level before, then this is really a no-brainer. At least these two towers on the left look a little more unique.

Btw, I finally did figure out a way to create a somewhat acceptable Union Jack in Lemmings! So here's an updated version (including the Highland exit) of


Streets of London

Also, there aren't many Asian countries in this pack yet... South Korea and Japan are still coming (one with quite an obvious candidate of a song ).
But then I also did a... thing:


Something in the water

If you don't get what this level is about...

Spoiler

1) Look up the flag, of course
2) Count the number of swimmer pickup skills

With regard to the Groupie levels, I mainly struggle with the levels in style of GigaLem and Wafflem .
In Wafflem's case, it's pretty much obvious what has to go into his level, but that doesn't mean I can come up with a cool solution involving lots of buttons and pickup skills yet.
In GigaLem's case, I have one level using a Freedom Planet tileset, and another one more in the spirit of the "GigaLems" pack.
Alberto Fernandes's level building style was pretty straightforward to figure out, but at the same time, such a level must be extremely annoying to build.

So that's a little road block in the Groupie rank at the moment. Perhaps I'll "re-finish" the main ranks first, rounding out the remaining locations to visit, before doing the final bits of the Groupie rank.

All the music edits are finished by now!

[Strato Incendus]

Sometimes I can really be thankful for certain song titles... the levels practically build themselves . Even if the song is actually about something completely different, but hey... that was already the case for "Cold Turkey" .


Aquarius

Mmh... guess which exit you have to get to?


Ovo je Balkan

Serbian for "This is the Balkans".
A bunch of flags here, most of which people are not very familiar with .

Spoiler

From left to right: Greece, Bulgaria, F. Y. R. Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia

That checkered terrain piece from the Sports tileset really was my salvation for the Croatian flag! I had almost given up already on getting that one right.


Bratislava Lover

[Strato Incendus]

Hey, sexy Lemming!


Ganglem Style

EDIT: Made a couple of tweaks, Plom's Garden tileset was really helpful in making this one more Asian looking! My previous self-made structures based on Gronkling's Ancient tileset alone weren't very convincing, in my view .

I thought one of GigaLem's Freedom Planet graphic sets would feature such structures as well, but nope... the canopy from the Dragon tileset was the closest thing I could find.

[grams88]

Those look really nice levels, you must of done a lot work with it all.

I like the whole countries idea which has went down quite well.

It's good getting inspired by other level designers. I see you like your Mcdonald's chips, I noticed that one in the (Bon appetit!) level.

[Strato Incendus]

Thanks, grams88! Although I'm only reading this right away because I was typing something different:

My hard drive just died this afternoon . The laptop can't boot because it doesn't find the operating system.

Fortunately, I kept saving everything on both an external hard drive as well as in Dropbox, so no levels are lost.

While Paralems, Pit Lems, and Lemmicks are only in the dropbox as nxps, since I was wise enough to allow level dumping (wink to Arty ), I will be able to restore the single level files from the packs, if everything else fails (although those should also be on the external hard drive).

More fortunately, I had already bought a new computer a couple of weeks ago - a Mac, though, for my music purposes, which is why I kept using the Windows Laptop for NeoLemmix.

So it will take some time until I will have set up everything on a Windows partition on that new Mac. But knock on wood, it's really just a slight delay, when it could have been a total pack development reset to zero.

Guys, keep saving your packs both on extra hard drives and online! The latter I did mainly due to the currently high risks of forest fires everywhere (an external HD is of little use if it's in the same house as your PC in case you have to leave quickly).

So I somehow sensed something like this coming - fate favours the prepared ones...

[Strato Incendus]

I'm back, everything is restored! Fate can really k*ss my a** at this point... This hard drive failure took me almost an entire work week, but he we are at last, the creation of the last few levels can continue.

I just tried the last version of the Old Formats Flexi Toolkit, mainly for the handy option of the Mac-style music rotation. Sadly, it doesn't work the way I'd need it to work for this pack, because it simply sets the rotation to a specific number starting with each rank, rather than being continuous.

That is: Rank 1 always starts with track 1, Rank 2 always starts with track 14 (Forest Green, as on "This should be a doddle!", and so on). Mac-style music rotation is tailor-made for 30 level-ranks.

This wouldn't work in Lemmings World Tour for several reasons:
1) The first rank is supposed to play ONML music throughout, the second one should start with the Can-Can, indicating the start of the "main pack".
2) The ranks are going to have 40 levels each now.

So I'm glad I tried this first by only deleting the music information from five levels in the Amateur rank.

Additional work was involved because the last version of the Flexi Toolkit doesn't allow several levels with the same level ID - it took me a while to figure out that the only reason I had those was due to the way I create re-runs of preceding levels (take the same level file, save it as a new one, modify the skill set). So I reset and changed the level ID on all of these. It's nice to have the player be able to differentiate between an original level and its rerun, of course - one just needs to know about this.

But ultimately, I'm going to have to keep entering the music manually for this pack - which of course is a pain whenever levels change order, but eh...

[Strato Incendus]

After one week of an unwanted hiatus, here are some more.

Meaning more places, more stupid puns, more obscure references...


Stonehenge

Yes, that is a song . Taken from arguably the most frequently quoted movie among musicians, "Spinal Tap".
Originally, I wanted to make this an 11-of-everything level - you know, because "it's one louder!"
But that would have been way too generous for such a small level!


Holy Mountains

Two flags here... I'm not taking a stance on territorial disputes in this pack!


Black Polished Chrome

As I said - really stupid puns...

I couldn't even come up with something involving a "War Saw", so I just went with this title by The Doors. While they are comparatively well-known as a band, I don't know whether this song is, too... I certainly did not know about it before.

[Strato Incendus]

More stuff... doesn't always have to be a city, btw .


Ring, Ring!

I'm considering a re-run of this - Lady Gaga's "Telephone". But I'd have to come up with an alternative solution first to justify that .


Iron Maidan

More stupid puns, as promised !


Ayo Technology

"Belgium... is a beautiful city", right? And one we couldn't go to in New Formats. Because obviously, you know what is going to happen when you split those atoms...

(Plus, Belgium actually has some pretty old nuclear power plants which don't really fulfil all the security standards anymore, so... )


And here is the very last level of the pack (i.e. the last level of the Groupie rank). I've hidden it away in a spoiler tag, just to make taking a look optional .
I think the largest pack to date should appropriately end with the largest level to date.

Spoiler

The Grand Puzzle

I'm still thinking about whether I should change that title to something that is a song, as well. Not every level in the Groupie rank is a song, because first and foremost, there needs to be an allusion to which forum user the level is referring to.

But for this one, I could imagine a song that takes about as long as solving the level . Hence, the top contender for the title is currently "The Great Mystery" by Avantasia.
"Grand Puzzle" or "Great Mystery" doesn't really make that much of a difference .

[Strato Incendus]

Yet more places to go!

It's getting a little taxing to create these levels... but at this point, there's a "pull factor" in form of "the anticipation of the pack being finished soon"... more so than my internal "push factor" to simply create levels.

Hence, I was a little afraid the level quality might suffer from this... especially the city levels, where most of the effort goes into designing the terrain. But somehow, most of them still manage to have somewhat unique and original solutions. Perhaps because I usually approach them thinking: "Okay, this is the terrain, I can't really change anything about it, because that's the way it has to look; now, what's the most whacky and outlandish way I could imagine to navigate through this mess?"


Sun of Jamaica


So Wat? (I'm still a Rockstar)


Bang-a-Boomerang


Taj-a, Taj-a, Taj-a, Taj me


Georgia on my mind

For the last one, it was really a blessing that this title came back to my mind... Now the entire Caucasus region is complete!

(While the title of course originally referred to the US state of Georgia, the Beatles used the same line in "Back in the USSR", and deliberately so with the double-meaning.)

But as you can see, some of the other titles are really stretching to somehow work the name of the country, city, or landmark into the level title. So if you have any better ideas that are also song titles, please let me know!

(In case it's not clear: Those three places are supposed to represent Angkor Wat in Cambodia; Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh; and the Taj Mahal in India.)

[Strato Incendus]

Okay, I almost would have given up on this specific place - given that it requires a Union Jack inside another flag, plus a very oddly shaped building. But thankfully, I found some way out.


The Phantom of the Opera

When depicting the Sydney Opera House from the side is too difficult, just look at it from the front!

Though there seems to be a great lack of slightly round or curvy shapes among graphic sets so far. That slightly curved outer line of the three rectangular building parts, those were actually shaped by countless inverted slopes set to "erase" from the outside. Granted, those were required anyway to cut away the excess of the blue squares inside, but still...

[Strato Incendus]

We're getting really close now:

Levels per rank:
Noisemaker: 39/40
Amateur: 37/40
Professional: 39/40
Diva: 40/40
Rockstar: 38/40
Legend: 38/40
Encore: 40/40
Groupie: 32/40

So yeah, the Groupie levels are still the most challenging to create. Some of you guys are really good at hiding your signature level design patterns - or maybe you're even so innovative that you don't even have a pattern!

In the meantime, here are some more locations:


Japan

Don't worry, the Hiroshima level is still coming as well . If you're wondering what the other flag is doing there, guess what those two countries have in common historically...


Down in Mexico


Eagle

A little trip to the Shqipëria (Tirana, Albania). I must admit I'm quite pleased with the way that double-headed eagle turned out.


Bay of Pigs

This one is a zombie level. And since the player has to be on the victorious side in order for the level to be solvable, guess who the zombies are...


Only Time

Another zombie level that also includes lots of radiation, as you can see. This was one of the first levels to be created for Lemmings World Tour, and pretty much was the main reason for continuing this pack in Old Formats.

If you get what this level is about (i.e. remember the song), that should also be a hint for you to prepare for the occasionally dark and dirty humour of this pack.

Case and point:


The Shocker

[Strato Incendus]

It's been a while, since I've been busy working on my master thesis (and still am ^^), but I'm glad to announce that

Level creation is finally finished!

Now, all that's left to do is backroute checking and level-reordering according to difficulty. Though the resulting order is probably not going to be the final one. (The main nuisance about this is having to re-enter the music manually every time, since my 40 levels per rank don't go well with the Mac-style music rotation option.)

In the meantime, here are some levels which did not make the cut, and I think you'll be thankful for that in most cases ^^. None of these levels have working solutions anyway - if I notice something isn't working out, I usually don't finish it at all .


Barbie Girl (in a Barbie World)

This one is really neat looking, plus it also had a wonderfully stupid gag where if you'd have a lemming climb on top of the earthwire, he'd be struck by a lightning bolt from the cloud above (the blue lightning trap from the Bubble tileset). But in the end, it was just a vertical repetition of the same basic idea of a Lemming house, as in "Sweet Home Alabama" and "House of the Rising Sun", so I didn't continue this one. I may come back to it later, though .


Ring of Fire

Fire set to "on terrain only" sadly doesn't behave the same way as water on terrain: The entire area where the fire object would normally mean is still deadly, even if there's no terrain. That made it pretty hard to have the lemmings actually fall "into the burning ring of fire". Even though GigaLem's fire traps work nicely on terrain from a visual standpoint, it was hard to implement something interesting game-mechanics-wise, especially since this song would have been supposed to go in the Legend rank. Instead, it got culled for gratuitous violins .


99 Luftballons

The good thing was: The title of this Nena song made it pretty clear what the terrain for this level would look like.
The bad thing was: The title of the Nena song made it pretty clear what the terrain for this level would look like .
i.e. a totally obnoxious builder fest in order to connect 99 free-floating balloons. I thought of grouping some of them closer together to create miner-friendly terrain, so I could mix things up a little. But sadly, miners only really make sense to be used this way if you have climbers to send ahead - and these balloons aren't very climber-friendly either. As you can see, I tried some stuff with gliders and updraft and tricky crowd control, but I still couldn't see a way to avoid massive usage of builders and/or platformers - so this level got destroyed with 99 pinpricks .


Don't drop that bomb on me

This level got removed for different reasons: I tried to make the falling oh-noer trick work. My goal was to use it like in Lemmings Revolution, to prevent a lemming from splatting without using a floater. Sadly, the distance an oh-noer can fall before exploding isn't even near splat height, so that whole idea wouldn't have been possible in the first place.


Finally, I would have liked to include Falco's "Rock me, Amadeus!" But I couldn't come up with anything specific involving my Instruments tileset that would have had a clear connection to this title. Maybe I'll do such a level in the future, probably in New Formats using Arty's Silhouette tileset, since that makes it easy to build levels in the shape of musical notes.


Ah yeah, and here's the infamous "Hiroshima" level. This one actually did make it into the pack - in fact, it was the very last level I just created. I kept procrastinating this, and I can tell you I really hated creating it. Funnily enough, not because of the radiation - that's actually the coolest part about it - but because of the mess the zombies on the right were causing, with regard to the relative distance to the pioneer lemmings. I constantly had to restart to shift terrain pieces a couple of pixels, until what I had in mind finally worked out.

That said, this level probably was harder to design than it will be to play . The execution is not particularly difficult, I'd say - now that I've made sure all the terrain pieces are in the right place!


Hiroshima

[Strato Incendus]

The Lemmings World Tour has begun! Go and meet the band on the road!

This rehearsal room here can therefore now be closed !