Deluxe Paint

Deluxe Paint was the art package that everyone used on the Amiga. It did everything, and did it well. So well, that DPaint was bundled with the Amiga for years. Even now, theres little to compare with it for doing small bitmap animations. ProMotion has since emulated the interface on the PC to try and recapture this lost market.

Lemmingology

A typical Gary level was sparse to the point of being empty! Only when Dave told him to make it pretty did Gary go throught all his level and fill in the blanks.

TheFastFoodKitchen

I loved making levels that forced the player to dart back and forth between many tasks, and The Fast Food Kitchen was one of my favorites.

The Complete History of
Lemmings
By
Mike Dailly

(Part 2)

The Lemmings Editor

The level editor was built around the Deluxe Paint interface; a program everyone at DMA was very familiar with. It was incredibly easy to use, and being built directly into the game it allowed for a very quick turn around on level creation.Gary, myself and Scot were the ones that did the bulk of the levels, But Dave did manage to sneek a couple in as well; although it was probably because he told us too and we couldn't really argue with him.

Having said that, it did take him ages to get any that were even worth while considering! He used to try and beat us, and after proudly stabbing a finger at the screen and saying "There! Beat that!", we'd calmly point out a totally new way of getting around all his traps, and doing it in a much simpler method. "Oh...", he'd mutter, and scramble off to try and fix it.

Of course, this was the beauty of Lemmings; there were so many ways of completing a level. I can't remember if anyone else managed to get levels into the final game, Steve tried hard - since there was money to be had! But just couldn't get to grips with it.

We all actually had great fun doing levels, and were always trying to beat each other by doing the most fiendish deisgn we could. This never happened of course, and by the end of Lemmings we were all so good at the game, it would only be a matter of seconds before we figured out how to complete a new level.

Its Hero Time!

We did manage to fox Psygnosis now and then, and I can lay claim that it took John White an hour to figure out "Its hero time". When ever psygnosis did some testing, we'd get back a fax with the level name, time taken to complete, and some comments and a difficulty rating. These were usually aound 3-6 minutes, and some general coments on how they found it.

Every now and again though, the fax would be covered in scribbles with the time and comment's crossed out again and again; this is what we were striving for while we were designing the levels, and it gave us all a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

You could always tell the levels Gary did, as they were very "minimal", a few blocks and that was about it. My own (and Scott's to some degree) tended to look like pictures, or at the very least pretty. Scott's levels tended to be packed together better than mine, but I liked drawing huge levels; "Hunt the Nessy" and "The Steel Mines of Kessel" were mine for example.

I also loved making the user do multiple things at once. "The Fast Food Kitchen" was one of mine, and required the player to jump back and forth to complete the level.

The Art Gallery

After I created the "The Art Gallery" Dave did in fact tell Gary to go and make them a bit more pretty, as he could now see what was possible, and couldn't imagine people  paying for bland looking levels, and 3 blocks on screen was just that. So Gary went off and put lots of  fluff around the edges to make them more appealing, but nothing that interfered with the playing of his level.

You can see examples of this in levels like " Lemmingology" , "We all fall down" and "All or Nothing". All of these have very simple play areas, while the surrounding detail is meaning-less to the level itself. Still, it didn't stop Gary from producing some great levels.

I also liked to give small clue's in the name( "It's Hero Time" refering to a single Lemming going 'over the top' as it were), while Gary used to try and make clever refrences to things ("I have a cunning plan" - Black Adder), where as Scott just tended to make up nice sounding names. Of course we all did a bit of everything, my "The Island of the Wicker people" being a refrence to a line from Batman.

The Last Level!

There was fierce competition for the honour of the last level, but in the end Scott won with his monster "Rendezvous at the Mountain".

Hunt the Nessy!

A typical level from me would be something that looked like a picture in the preview screen.

Another Gary Level

Gary always concentrated on the actual puzzel, and not what it looked like; an odd thing for an artist to do.