Classic Game Postmortem: Lemmings
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 พ.ค. 2019
- In this 2019 GDC classic postmortem, Mike Dailly discuss the creation of the seminal DMA Design puzzle-platform game Lemmings, which debuted on Amiga in 1991 and subsequently appeared on a multitude of other platforms.
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I'm so grateful that these early game devs had the foresight to save parts of their work. I'll bet at the time, like most of us going to work most days, it was just another day with no concept of the ramifications of their work, but they were lite laying foundations for the gaming world we live in now. But think about the hardware generations we've been through since this game came out. And this absolute legend managed to preserve his work through all of it.
Remember, people, take notes, save your work, because none of us know what the flap of a butterflies wings will do, and maybe some some young game developer will be listening to you gdc looking to understand how their favorite game came together.
"Lemmings here, lemmings there, lemmings, lemmings, everywhere." - A poem I wrote in 1st grade.
Oh no! No more lemmings!
This channel is klling it with classic game postmortem uploads. I love it!! Thank you very much.
Unfortunate choice of words, haha
Yeah I wish they did more post mortems. So many great games and they have barely scratched the surface
I'm from Dundee and didn't even know about the Lemming statues haha , i'm gonna go find them tomorrow with my little girl. Classic game of my childhood
It's marked on Google Maps now, I got the statues added on there a few years back when I visited them myself.
Lemmings! This was one of those games from my childhood that I still fondly remember and that stood out with a novel and creative concept. I spent weeks playing the original, I was 13 at the time. Great talk!
45:35 - that was a really nice touch!
You know you've done well when your game still has an active fan community ~30 years later. ;)
@namida where is it? I looked and the site i found does not work properly
@@socialjusticewarrior2316 Lemmings Forums dot Net
The old dot Com site was abandoned by the admin years ago.
Lemmings (SNES port) was one of my favorite games growing up. its variety of puzzles and tools for solving them, along with the art/music, really came together and made it a great experience. I sunk many hours into it, and it was time well-spent.
This is so awesome. Lemmings is a huge landmark in gaming and a big part of my childhood, loved to see this. And so interesting to see so much game design was informed from tools and limitations.
"We don't talk about Worms"...
This game had a huge influence on me. Thank you for making Lemmings!!!
The first two on PC were MY CHILDHOOD. I especially loved the music of LEMMINGS 2, very hummable, and sometimes I made up lyrics. Loved all the differently-themed tribes, too!!! As a kid, I had no problem with all the extra abilities! I would probably buy these again on Steam.
Oh, and I loved the kind of macabre underside of the original LEMMINGS. It was the perfect level of unnerving for me at that age.
The duck hunt scope easter egg is *chef's kiss*
The feet sticking to the ground! Never noticed that before specifically, but that must be such a huge reason why the animation just seems so right. It makes it seem so real.
Great presentation! Totaly enjoyed that! :-) Lemmings was the first game I ever saw on an Amiga and was blown away by it, totally revolutionary! Still one of my favourite games :-) I love the music too.
I loved DeluxePaint and Lemmings. I used to have a hundred little puff paint Lemmings stuck on the mirror of my childhood dresser. Once in awhile, those still turn up in old boxes...
I remember when my dad introduced my brothers and I to this game. I think he did it because he knew the difficulty would keep us occupied for a long time and give him some peace and quiet
Awesome talk! What I remember the most about the game is the music on my Amiga (I don't like the PC music), it really set the mood for levels. My favourite level for music was "A beast of a level". Good times. That was one of those games that really shined on the Amiga at the time.
Legendary classic game...... I only ever played the PC version, & it literally provided the entire family countless hours of fun. The Sound FX & especially the music were also quite cool.
Thank you for making this public, GDC. What a brilliant video, some fascinating insights into a truly fantastic game.
What a time for this video - I'm in the middle of playing the DOS version of Lemmings 1.
This talk explains much of the (sometimes strange) level design. Much apprechiated! :)
Loved the super scope bit.
Great talk! Love the spirit of the old days!
Ive been waiting on this one!!!!
I'm a big fan of Mike's work throughout his career and for 4 or 5 years until he left YoYo recently our pay checks came from the same company even if they are 250 miles north of our office. As close as I'll come to working on Lemmings ;)
29:28 "being able to put faces to people is quite nice"
So true, he's basically saying the same thing as that other excellent GDC talk "Put Your Name on Your Game"
If there is few things I'd want to mention of is, I'm curious about those 500 cut levels, If there's anyway of archiving them it'd be nice to know and it would be big news on seeing them after 28 years of being lost. Another thing I should mention of is lemmings clones. Stuff Like Neolemmix for single player and Lix for Multiplayer. They're community driven fan projects that are still worked on to this day. Even if no official Lemmings games get made, the spirit and community still lives and the custom level scene is pretty much alive.
ONE OF MY FAVS so far
The Lemmings game made by sad puppy is really good too. Funny, it's the only mobile game I've played every single day since I've installed it
The question about a movie at the questions section makes me think of , next to the lemmings movie. I'd like to see a movie about FTL. Anyway, loved this talk lemmings is one of the first games I've played almost 30 years ago. I remember sitting with my father and trying to get through the levels.
I still remember playing Lemmings 2 on an Atari ST as a teen, and discovering two related bugs.
The first was a very minor one, and I never managed to reproduce it: there's a particular level where, as part of a solution, you need to send a fencer (digging a shallow upward slope) into a blocker to stop him digging, leaving the blocker to die later. Or, if you missed your aim, the fencer would undercut the blocker and stop him blocking - in which case the fencer was doomed. Somehow I managed to complete the level without losing a lemming, meaning that tribe had one extra lemming for the rest of the game.
That would have been fine - levels fell into a standard pattern of having a small number of lemmings do all the work to set up the solution, including any necessary losses, then "the rest" could just follow the path to the exit, so having an extra lemming would only have made a difference if there were an incredibly tight time limit on a level. But that's where the second bug came in, with a little bit more of a story to it.
The way the game was set up, you had 12 tribes, each starting with, if memory serves, 60 lemmings, and having to make their way through 10 levels, with an allowed number of losses on each level to get a gold for that one level. If you lost too many lemmings on one level, you could still continue, get gold on the rest of the levels with that tribe, and come back and just redo that one level to get it up to gold standard, and you'd still have gold on all the rest - though you could replay the next level with the extra lemmings to carry them forward and repeat until the end. All well and good, except that there were a lot of levels where it was easy enough to get just one lemming to the exit and the tricky part was getting all the ordinary lemmings without special powers there, so the obvious strategy was to play an easy early level with a tribe, rescue one lemming but kill off the rest, take that lone lemming through the rest of the tribe's levels to get gold on all of them, then replay that easy level to get it gold.
But the devs had thought of that, so on "completing" all 12 tribes that way, you get a message saying you need to rescue at least half of each tribe (which in practice means solving each level "properly" while stil being able to get the golds in any order once you've got good enough solutions to get most of the tribe through to their final level). Except when I went back through the tribes and rescued as many as possible, I still got that message. It's possible that, rather than rechecking the victory conditions each time you try to claim victory, the game saves a flag that you were underpopulated in the save files, and doesn't actually check to see if you've fixed it, but my guess is that it was actually that extra lemming that did it - that for some reason, the game doesn't check for all golds and each tribe at 30+ survivors, instead checking for all golds and each tribe having, for example, 30-53 lemmings, or whatever the intended maximum number of survivors is.
If I had to guess, the story I'd make up would be that the first version of the end condition required you to have rescued that intended maximum from every tribe, then they decided you should be allowed to perfect levels out of order, so you wouldn't need to repeat levels you'd already completed with the minimum number of deaths, so that got changed from checking if the number of survivors was equal to checking if they were less than or equal to the target (making it easier to change back if needed since all the numbers would still be there without needing to be recalculated). Then the cheesy lone hero strategy got picked up, and the check got changed to also be at least 30.
Fucking wonderful :) I speedran Fun and Tricky on the SMS recently if anyone wants to watch. So interesting to learn the technical stuff!
Lemmings 2 hit the mark!
Making Resource Management rewarding 🥰
The artwork is still amazing in our time
Oh, I loved playing lemmings on my dad's computer back then.
Great game. I worked on the team porting this to Sony PSP!
lemmings really is one of those classics.
Also interesting to hear about older games on old hardware and the challenges thereof, when you're just slightly too young to really have worked with that stuff yourself.
Sure, I had an atari 800 xl, but it was the early 90's and I was about 8.
No, my real learning period for game dev stuff was late 90's early 2000's...
Also console development is fascinating because as an amateur it was so inaccessible.
Anyone could do PC or mocrocomputer development even just as a hobby, but console development was definitely harder to get into.
Slso I do it now, with older consoles because the documentation and tools can be found nowadays.
I actually study SNES development a lot, and seeing how you managed so many sprites on that hardware when custom graphics are so tricky (bitplanes are a pain for that) was fascinating.
Consider the graphics modes carefully huh. XD
I know there are many data transfer modes for VRAM, but still drawing a custom graphic fast enough for an update every frame is impressive...
Also that multiply bug. Ouch.
The founder of tt games has his own TH-cam channel called gamehut. he talks about programming on the mega drive.
@@john_hunter_ yeah Game Hut is a fascinating channel. It's absolutely insane the kind of things he was able to do on restrictive hardware. Like get full motion video working on a normal mega drive/genesis (not a Sega CD or 32x, the stock console). And the 3D effects in games like Mickey Mania. He's like a genuis savant. Like with this video, these British companies were all so amazing at programming and getting the most out of consoles because they all began as bedroom programmers in the 80s, teaching themselves to program rather than learning how to do it the "proper" way. So they weren't limited by formality, and came up with all these ingenious tricks to get the most out of hardware. The stuff even just on the spectrum that was achieved is crazy
Back when i was still a teen playing Lemmings on a Amiga 2k and later 4k.
I loved Lemmings.
I miss that old pixel-synced animation style, it's almost a lost genre. Jetpack and Liero were my favorites.
4:27 Immediately recognisable as a DPaint anim. :)
How can anybody forget the Lemmings Can Can music?
Yes! And some Tchaikovsky, O Little Town of Bethlehem, How Much Is That Doggy in the Window. I was expecting him to mention the way they used older music that was (probably) out of copyright.
Yes! And some Tchaikovsky, O Little Town of Bethlehem, How Much Is That Doggy in the Window. I was expecting him to mention the way they used older music that was (probably) out of copyright.
I remember playing this on snes
good to know how this game unfolded was always a steady entity
I've tried the new Lemmings mobile game. I'm not a fan of it. It's all rigid and you have to stick to the grid structure. The original Lemmings is more free form and lets you build and dig in any location.
I still have my first PC that is an 8Mhz processor and it has Oh No More Lemmings on it...i used to play it hours and hours. The machine is still fully operational. I think I must play it soon. I also have Lemmings 1 and 2 on Snes and Lemmings 1 on NES and Gameboy
Was Mike Dailly the first one using this kind of "Pixel Clicks"(Title Screen) ? Because I always wondered where the "hacking" from "The Net" (1995) came from and it seems pretty familiar ;)
My first pc game that i loved
666 was a good idea, shame I missed it!
OMG, please say there are still working copies of the level editor out there...
I always wondered why they never released the editor for lemmings? I even remember that I saw once in one of those many game sellers that appeared on Amiga Format and all those magazines one of them listed something called "Lemmings Construction Set" an it was listed as "coming soon" something that never happened. I wonder why they never sold that one??? it'd have been the Mario Maker of those times.
I get the impression that his views on game design are very opposite mine. I thought lemmings 3 was the good one. It's the only one where I was able to actually rely on things to work as expected, precisely because they didn't have an immediate response. Further, having to do multiple things at once constantly was what I considered to be the most irritating aspect of levels in lemmings. Why would you want your player constantly pausing after every command? I guess the design of those games makes a lot more sense knowing that they were designing specifically for player failure though.
I can see where GTA came from... He really loves killing stuff.
Oh lemmings lads
The Aardman video about easter eggs is on vimeo:
vimeo dot com slash 113086493
The Lemmings 2/ SNES bit is around 7:50 in
at st! at st!
This guy is a potential murderer. The amount of moments he mentions how sastisfying it is to kill is disturbing.
Lemmings. A game by the studio later known as Rockstar.
TH-cam link to the video he mentions at 43:22: th-cam.com/video/zeiY85IGgDI/w-d-xo.html
42:37 :D
ypou never played good lemmongs games unless you played its multiplayer modse, on an amiga. with 2 mousees for 2 players in splitscreen.
lemmings is a realtime strategy game, and a very good one at that. the multiplayer function is just missing in almost all of its ports, because most hardware at the time could not deal with 2 mouses at the same time, not in software and not in hardware, there was no such thing as a USB port, and an os that could support 2 mouses at the same time seemed just silly. But the amiga could do it, and Lemmings could do it.
2 player spliutzscreen, 2 entrances, 2 exists. 2 mouse cursors, lemmings from 2 exists had different color scemes, one player could only control one type of lemming, but a blocker blocks any lemming color...
each player gets one exit in its color. maps where alwaqys mirror symmetric and paths always crossed each other.
you scored for ANY lemming that lef the map trough your exit, including ooponent lemmings, and sabotaged the exit of the opponent with your lemmings close to it.
bith players had the same resources, a bit more of them, but there was no way to get them back. so its a fast paced tactrical SRT, with very little strategy, but still, building bridges kind of counts as "expansion"
DMA Design: Bring back Unirally (Uniracers) on the N. Switch!!
Buy nit soon.
lessons, build dev mode into game, not separate
lessons, make sequel 30-50% new features, no more.
13:05 LGTOW
Man this guy hates Dave
How the mighty have fallen! Watching this post mortem just makes me sadder by the rubbish mobile game this franchise has turned into...
The mobile Lemmings game by sad puppy is really good