What do you mean by more playable?
One of the most fun times I've had on the Forums so far is when I took part in
this challenge with Minim a few years ago. I also love doing
Skills You Can't Live Without with Proxima. A common theme of both of these challenges is to find as many different ways to solve a level as possible. With this in mind, anything that opens the game up for repeated play value and/or increases the chances of finding alternative solutions is an attractive prospect.
Forum content has mostly distilled the game down to "single-solution picture puzzles" - levels that are potentially solvable without even actually playing the game (I even recall someone saying they solved a level using a text editor!
)
Whilst I
completely understand wanting a level to be solvable only by its intended solution, and I concur that this is a popular level design type for many good reasons, it certainly shouldn't be the
only represented example of level design in a community as creative as ours is. There are so many other possibilities that a game like Lemmings can offer (DD being one of them), and I'm up for exploring as many of them as possible.
What are the advantages or the potential you see in Direct Drop?
Great question.
This, for a few examples (I can't vouch for the quality of that pack as I made it a few years ago now!)
The average DD solution takes a certain amount of skill and tenacity to get right, and it's something I feel could make for an interesting and inspiring level design feature: rather than limiting the skillset, give the player plenty of skills but enforce the DD solution. The example above is a full pack of such levels, but the norm could be that a pack might contain a small handful of DD levels dotted throughout to add a bit of spice and variety.
Or, they can be an alternative solution, perhaps.
Lemminas Origins features a number of levels for which the talisman is a DD solution: it's solvable in other ways, but finding the DD solution awards the talisman.
That's probably the main advantage I see with it: a DD solution can still be a challenge without necessarily placing other restrictions on the level (such as time, skillset or save requirement). I suppose an eventual goal of mine is to make a non-trivial pack of levels which don't always rely on restrictions to skillset to provide the player with a challenge. DD is just one way to achieve this.