Thoughts on Merging Old Levels with a Newer Pack?

[Nessy]

Something that I have been thinking about lately.

For those of you who don't know I have been working on some new levels for a new pack for a while now (although not so much lately due to real life and forum responsibilities), but I have been thinking about this none-the-less. The more levels I create the more uneasy I get about having this pack being a completely different pack than my previous pack. Not sure why I feel that way as many forum members have done multiple packs.

I decided to make a post to ask other's people's opinions on the subject matter. I was thinking of merging almost all levels from my previous pack into my new pack. My reasoning is as follows:

1) Allow people to play all my levels in one place.

2) Realize my dream of making a larger level pack of 100-120 levels with a better difficulty curve. It also feels weird to me to have two packs where one is 40 levels and the other is 100 something.

3) Now that I have more experience with level design I have been wanting to give some of my Migration levels a little make-over design and solution-wise without destroying even more replays because apparently my levels have been infamous for replay breakage lately Of course, my old pack will not be removed. It just won't be updated anymore.

4) The new pack is still going to be over 90 new levels and less than 40 old ones, so the merge won't water down the pack.

Thoughts? I would like to hear them

[namida]

Personally, for me, I've integrated levels from other packs into a pack in one of two cases: The older pack is a poor quality pack with a few good levels that are worth saving, or the old pack has been withdrawn as a whole (or possibly the individual level removed) and the destination pack needs a new level for some reason.

If you plan to keep the old pack around, I don't see much point, although certianly if you feel it'd work best for your pack, go for it.

"All of my levels in one place" works for a while, until you've got a huge number of created levels.

[Simon]

Group the levels as you see fit.

Ranks/packs don't seem optimal for housekeeping anyway. For development, you probably want everything in one place with version control. Then have automated exports into ranks/packs/other accepted formats.

Ultimately, ranks and packs are common only because Lemmings 1 had them. They work for sets of 100-ish levels. But the level is the unit of culture, not the rank or the pack.

You worry about replay breakage. Is that from updated physics or from changed levels?

-- Simon

[Nessy]

Thanks namida and Simon for your thoughts.

After a lot of consideration and thought I have decided to merely make my new pack an update of the same old pack instead of a separate pack. I was against this at first, but I honestly think this is the best course of action. There are some levels in my old pack that I just don't really want to include anymore, there are some major changes I want to also make now that I have some more experience with level design, and I also want to take more advantage of what NeoLemmix has to offer such as its skills, talismans, etc. With this in mind I can go ahead and add in everything else I want to add in and finally bring the original pack to where I want it to be.

Before I officially move forward with this whenever I finally have the time to do so, I would like to hear the thoughts of the people on the forums that actually have done this such as MobiLems II which seems to have done what I'm thinking right now or a little more of Flopsy's thoughts since he did mention them to me on IRC not too long ago.

"All of my levels in one place" works for a while, until you've got a huge number of created levels.

Good point, although to be honest I don't have plans to make any more levels after the number I'm doing now. Anything else in the future will be its own work though.

You worry about replay breakage. Is that from updated physics or from changed levels?

I honestly don't know. I know for certain it isn't the physics changes. I'll just have to be a lot more careful in the future now, or at least (and most importantly) warn people that it will happen.

[mobius]

I think your over thinking it; I think you should do it however you want to do it. If the result looks good and is fun, then it's correct.

My first pack was designed for Lemmini and it came to a finished state. It is still currently playable on Lemmini (nobody using Lemmini anymore is a separate matter).

My second pack set out to be brand new but I only made 10-20 new levels I was actually proud of and usable. I didn't feel like making a pack so small and also it seemed that a lot of people at that time weren't familiar with my older levels because they didn't use Lemmini; so I merged the two, removing the lesser original levels and polishing the others.

I've never set a number goal for a levelpack (of my own). Personally I don't like this idea. I want to make levels that are good. And I don't get nice round numbers of good ideas. Subsequently I don't want any "filler" levels just to get a nice round number. I want every level to be memorable. I don't care if that means there's 54 or 68 etc. levels.