SuperLemmini Wish List

[Simon]

At any time, SL must either directly show the following, or show enough other stuff to allow the player to compute the following:

• How many more lemmings are still required to win.
  
• How many lemmings are available.
  

This describes the main goal, and whether it's still attainable. Lemmings should not be a memory game. We can argue if it's action puzzle or not, but it's certainly not a memory game. It's a major source of rage to fail or cancel a level because I forgot the save requirement. Why would you hide the main goal in such game's design after someone points it out?

Great to have but not absolutely required:

• How many lemmings are still in the hatches.
  

For the choice of statistics to show, Amiga is a bad reference. Amiga and DOS didn't show the save requirements. It's one of the flaws, and we don't have to proliferate that.

NL's choice feels like a local optimum: (hatch), (hatch + out), (saved − required). I tried hard to make something even better for Lix and didn't find anything. Displaying ratios with a slash, e.g. (saved)/(required), made the stats harder to read, not clearer. Well, please try to beat it, too, we'll never know.

Ditch the percentages, show absolute values.

don't think icons are the way to go with this at all, since SuperLemmini's close emulation of the Amiga interface

IN-OUT-HOME proposal is also a deviation from the Amiga interface

For the style of the stats, is-like-Amiga can carry more weight than for the choice of stats.

attempting a borderless fullscreen window...

Fullscreen window is promising, more than exclusive fullcreen, yes. Fast to enter and exit, cheap alt-tab, plays nice with other things, etc.

-- Simon

[WillLem]

But your IN-OUT-HOME proposal is also a deviation from the Amiga interface, and I honestly don't see the point. What advantage does it have over keeping things the way they are?

Simon's already pretty much nailed everything that I would have said in response to this, but I might as well summarise the main points:

It's not a deviation stylistically or aesthetically, which pictorial icons would be.

The point/advantage is to directly show the player how close they are to completing the level in terms of its save requirement, which at the moment relies on memory and calculation.

Ditch the percentages, show absolute values.

SuperLemmini already provides an option for this. I generally choose to have percentages on, but I'm equally happy with them switched off.

Fullscreen window is promising, more than exclusive fullcreen, yes. Fast to enter and exit, cheap alt-tab, plays nice with other things, etc.

Amen. This may be the way to go, especially if it's easiest to handle in the coding side of things as well.

[Proxima]

The point/advantage is to directly show the player how close they are to completing the level in terms of its save requirement, which at the moment relies on memory and calculation.

But your system (as you've described it) doesn't achieve this, so either there's a conceptual confusion going on, or maybe you had a good idea and just didn't describe it clearly enough.

L1's system (which, I assume, is also what SL currently uses) has "OUT" = lemmings in level and "IN" = lemmings saved.

Your proposal, as described, has "IN" = lemmings in hatch, "OUT" = lemmings in level and "HOME" = lemmings saved. So other than the relabelling, all that's changed is adding (hatch) as explicitly displayed -- which might be helpful but has nothing to do with how close the player is to meeting the save requirement. Is that not what you meant?

[WillLem]

Your proposal, as described, has "IN" = lemmings in hatch, "OUT" = lemmings in level and "HOME" = lemmings saved. So other than the relabelling, all that's changed is adding (hatch) as explicitly displayed -- which might be helpful but has nothing to do with how close the player is to meeting the save requirement.

It provides extra information about how many lems can potentially be saved, by letting the player know how many lems are yet to be spawned.

But yes, I see what you mean about "lems saved" already being displayed. Maybe displaying it as a negative number (like NL does) is the way to go so that it's clear how many have been saved, and how many remain to be saved.