The Making of Lemmings | Hacker News Reader

The Making of Lemmings

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They mention 3 bronze lemmings climbing a pole in Dundee. I found them on Google Streetview: https://goo.gl/maps/pqsWNpqTNPG2

This is exactly what I did after reading the article!

Not sure about the rest, but I know Mike Dailly is still in the industry, working for YoYo Games, makers of Gamemaker: Studio. They currently have a humble bundle going on, $15 gets you the pro version and html5, iOS, and Android export modules. If anyone's interested in getting their feet wet on some game prototyping, I'd recommend it.

I'm curious, how good is game maker for children? I'm looking to get my 9-year old something productive to do on the pc instead of spending all his screen time in terraria.

There's two modes of programming in gamemaker: drag'n'drop, and regular scripting (in 'GML', a c-like scripting language). You can get by for quite a while with basic games or prototypes just from dragging and dropping events and commands, like: object ball - create event: start ball moving right - keyboard up pressed event: move ball up etc.

I think it's accessible for kids if they take the time to go through some tutorials (there's one called "catch the clown" that's built in, and there's tons on youtube and various sites). As they get more advanced, they can change out their dropped in commands for "execute code" or "execute script (aka function)", and do lots of crazy things.

Additionally, nothing else is really needed outside of gamemaker. There's built-in editors for drawing, so you can make backgrounds and sprites right in there, though importing files from more advanced programs is possible. You'll want something external for sound editing, however. Or just import mp3's and wav's.

Here's the tutorial from an older version of gamemaker: http://www.murrieta.k12.ca.us/cms/lib5/ca01000508/centricity... While the gui has changed some since then, you can get the general idea of the drag'n'drop functionality, and judge for yourself if your kids can grasp it or not.

Finally, there's a marketplace with (some free, some not) assets of varying utility. There are lots of game demos or 'something to get you started' that you can then have them modify: https://marketplace.yoyogames.com/ For example, there's a guy on there who is doing a series called "how did they do that" that shows the basic concepts of a given game. Here's super mario brothers: https://marketplace.yoyogames.com/assets/3915/hdtdt-mario-br... They can download that, see how they did that, then play with variables and mod it to see how that changes the game.

If he has an android phone, and you set up the android environment on his computer, he can export his game to .apk right from there, and run it on his or his friend's devices (if you have a place online to upload it to). That has some serious cool factor among friends for sure.

Forgot to add that with the success of the bundle, they made a post with a great set of resources for beginners: https://www.yoyogames.com/blog/392

There's also their 'learn' section with youtube vids that you follow along to in order to make space shooters, platformers, etc.: https://www.yoyogames.com/learn

I first started programming with Game Maker 5.3, at 12. Took me 3 years to move on with Python. Learnt a lot from it (kinda funny seeing YYG blogging http://www.yoyogames.com/blog/126 back then about us kids learning how things tick)

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Rusky also hails from GM roots

http://enigma-dev.org is a FOSS alternative to GM

Have a look at Stencyl. It has many of the same frontend components as for example GameMaker, but it also has in-editor logic programming where you can select items from dropdowns to construct basic code with.

If you look at their webpage, just scroll down a bit and you'll see an example: http://www.stencyl.com/

Even so it will probably still be a bit daunting for a 9yo to start off with, you might have to provide some guided learning and maybe make a basic game together.

I can second Stencyl for kids (with assistance). It's a nice system.

> terraria

Have you tried to introduce him/her to Openclonk[0]?

[0]: http://www.openclonk.org/

GM was my first exposure to programming at about age 12. I would highly recommend it for your kid, for all the following reasons.

It doesn't require programming. Pretty complex games can be made with the drag-and-drop interface, which is simple & intuitive and designed for kids.

It naturally encourages a shift into programming. By age 14, I was completely off drag-and-drop and using the built-in GML programming language for everything instead. This programming language has some quirks to make it work with the GUI-driven system, but is still a decent introduction to programming (though these quirks mean I'd hesitate to recommend it to someone raised on more traditional languages).

The system is designed to be simple and accessible but also flexible. Its object & room model is abstract enough that you can make most any type of 2D game with it, from puzzles to platformers to top-down RPGs.

The system scales: your kid can learn the basics easily and do more complex things with the system as they get older and more experienced with it. Commercially successful games developed in GM include Hotline Miami, Undertale, Gunpoint and Cook, Serve, Delicious.

Above all, it's easy to get results in. Unlike more complex systems & traditional programming languages, a beginner can assemble a rudimentary game in an afternoon, rather than spending a week learning to draw a square.

If you sell it right I recommend Scratch.

https://scratch.mit.edu

I had to play it up for my daughter but she really ended up liking it for story telling.

On to Racket in a few years. :)

It seems GameMaker Studio Pro is only available on WIndows. There seems to be an older version also available for MacOSX, but the current version is Windows only, right? Please prove me wrong!

As far as I know, that's correct. There's a way to interface with a Mac for macOS/iOS compilation and testing in the global settings area. I believe Mac users put it in a VM and use it that way.

Russell Kay works with Mike Dailly at Yoyo Games too.

http://www.yoyogames.com/

Dave Jones is running Reagent Games, and they're working on a new Crackdown.

http://www.reagentgames.com/

I loved all the versions of Lemmings!

There is a browser one here that I've played for people that want to try it out.

Edited to add the link: http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/

> There is a browser one here that I've played for people that want to try it out.

Where?

This is an amazing port, it doesn't even use canvas. It was made too early for that.

It was made back in 2003, when DHTML was the latest buzzword! Here's some background info: https://crisp.tweakblogs.net/blog/3881/dhtml-lemmings-primer...

Some additional fun facts:

- The author doesn't host the game anymore on his own site, because he was served with a seize-and-desist order by the local copyright bullies (Stichting BREIN). Can't have nice things :-(

- Apparently the game progress doesn't get saved anymore, because it uses a cookie with a fixed expiration date: https://twitter.com/tinozijdel/status/149243951625412608

About a miolion dollars of work productivity just shifted to playing that link. Ty :)

Remember waiting for the C64 port to come out, right at the end of it's life. It eventually game out and I played it on a demo cassette from a c64 magazine. It wasn't great after having experienced the Amiga version. Maybe around 1993.

Just looked it up, 1994.... https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Lemmings

Pretty good seeing as the c64 was 10 years old at this point.

David Jones was my Steve Jobs growing up. Not only did I love Blood Money, he wrote an article on programming for Amiga Format about how the scrolling worked including working source code. I'd been trying to learn how to write a nice framework for my own graphic demos and mini games, but the code I found was mostly by bedroom coders and very scrappy. His code was the kind of code you'd expect an electrical engineering professional to write. Very clean and well documented and technically very good. I may well owe my 25 year year career in games (so far) to that guy, because the game I wrote subsequently got me a game job straight out of college when I had applications in to all the typical software companies at the time such as banks, ibm and bt.

>His code was the kind of code you'd expect an electrical engineering professional to write. Very clean and well documented and technically very good.

Boy have we worked with different electrical engineers!

haha fair point.

A great but obscure port of lemmings is the Nintendo DS homebrew port. They made it work perfectly with touch controls, and it plays the Amiga version's soundtrack with a MOD music player, which you can put other MOD files in if you want. I'm also pretty sure it uses the Amiga version's level formats.

A few years back I purchased for my iPad what seemed like a spiritual (hah!) successor to Lemmings: Spirits.

http://www.spacesofplay.com/spirits/

I enjoyed it for a while, but despite its beauty it never really caught my imagination the way playing Lemmings on the Mac did.

My brother and I are about to release yet another spiritual successor to Lemmings [0]. It has similar gameplay, but more interesting items (flip gravity, portal guns, etc.) and trickier puzzles. As much as I loved Lemmings, it gets a bit tedious once you figure out the stopper / builder combo.

[0] - https://applepinegames.com/inklings

Inklings' graphics are great. I love the interaction with the backgrounds. The look reminds me of the PS3 game LocoRoco Cocoreccho:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LocoRoco_Cocoreccho

This is one case where I feel like the graphics really held back the game despite being pretty. It was too hard to predict what the spirits were going to do.

Just stumbled upon a good video recap of the same story, which includes the prototype death animation test mentioned in the story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbxyqeIylHE&t=59s

That is a great video, it was nice to see all the versions. I had forgotten about Christmas Lemmings.

Thanks for posting it!

Comments from a year ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9684830

The unlikely predecessor of Grand Theft Auto.

They actually did a far more likely one. The huge robot game mentioned offhand in the article came to fruition as Walker, and is all about gunning down absolutely everything in front of you, including tiny troops. http://hol.abime.net/1655

Awesome game, My 4 year old daughter at the time would cry when they died.. Priceless

For those interested, you can find one of the original Lemmings creators here: https://twitter.com/mdf200 He also worked on many other things: http://www.javalemmings.com/miked/aboutme.htm

> ‘The goal was to get the sprites to 8×8,’ explains Dailly, ‘but they actually ended up about 8×10 – hardly anyone has ever noticed this figure was wrong.’

I understand how 8x8 sprites would be easier to tile than 8x10, but what is so "wrong" about 8x10 that people might notice?

Old games usually kept their sprite sizes to multiples of 8. 8x8, 8x16, 16x16, etc. So 8x10 would have been weird for the time, and anyone who thought about it would probably assume they were 8x8. But there was likely nothing actually "wrong" about 8x10. I am just speculating here though.

Nothing 'wrong', but the reason for the multiples of 8 was likely because sprites back then needed masks so that they could handle 'holes' properly. This was in the days before alpha channels, so there'd be spritemask instead - essentially a 2-colour sprite that acted like a single-bit alpha channel.

And if your sprite is a multiple of 8-pixels wide, then your spritemask takes up a whole-number of bytes, you can do funky low-level bit-twiddling to handle occlusions and it's more efficient in terms of memory space.

The Amiga had a powerful chip called a blitter for moving arbitrary rectangles of image data around (it could even draw lines) but most developers were used to nes, c64, snes, megadrive and these all used character based hw so 8 bit alignment made things easier and fast.

Not sure if they got the chronology right in the article. Walker was indeed an action game from DMA, but it came AFTER Lemmings. Now it's possible they got the idea of Lemmings while working on Walker, but they should mention the order of things properly.

Apparently they started working on Walker first, but then put it on hold.

The fact that Walker was not released until after Lemmings is not obvious from the article.

I used to play this on a Macintosh SE when I was in high school. Loved it then and I still love it now. For a college project friends and I made a simple clone. Back in the day of Borland Turbo C++ :-)

Richard Stanton's games articles are consistently excellent and worth seeking out.

Also known for his book "A Brief History of Video Games".

Is Lemmings for sale anywhere these days?

Nope.

Not lemmings, but if your after a good, free clone: http://pingus.seul.org/welcome.html

Download links don't seem to work

https://github.com/Pingus/downloads

Maybe on ebay?

I'd try to find and play the Amiga version, if at all possible. That was the state of the art gaming machine in its day, so I would be surprised if Lemmings made for any other platform was anywhere near as good.

I think there are some Amiga emulators around, if you don't have the hardware.

The Amiga version was the only one with a split-screen, two-player mode using two mice. Using a joystick or keyboard just didn't compare.

I guess you might be able to emulate that these days by talking directly to two USB mice and bypassing the OS' input layer.

X11 supports multiple cursors supposedly. Windows also does but I've only ever seen that with glovePIE.

I remember old game Settlers (also called Serf City in some regions) that allowed a coop splitscreen with two mice.

Superb game.

The Amiga version had the best sound of all platforms that got Lemmings. Period. That's the definitive version for me. The Two player mode with 2 mice was incredibly fun!

I'll again argue that the Acorn Archimedes version is better. The instruments seem cleaner that the Amiga version.

https://youtu.be/ApPGPSH_k7I

Acorn hardware used log encoded samples, while nearly everything else used linear. The simple mod players in games tended not to do any conversion and instead used preconverted mods (which were then a pig to pay in anything else). So it's possible that the Arc mods for Lemmings had been converted from a higher bit rate source, rather than just using copies of the Amiga ones.

Whether an 8-bit log samples sounds better than an 8-bit linear sample when it's not processed through YouTube, I have no idea...

Side by side comparisons! Via Youtube, alas, but:

Acorn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwXthGJfHLc

Amiga (emulated): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT6vxY9p7yg

The Amiga's way brighter, but that's probably because it's emulated (and so is a digital recording). But it's pretty obvious that at least some of the tracks on the Arc are recompositions --- One Way Or Another is missing a lot of instruments, Mind the Step is a different pitch, Awesome is a different composition entirely...

The Amiga had a hardware mixer with four channels (with fixed stereo positions). The Acorn had a more strictly powerful CPU but had no hardware mixer. Maybe they had to reduce the number of channels to allow for this? But I was pretty sure the Lemmings mods were classic 4-channel anyway (one channel per Amiga hardware channel).

What struck me was the different instruments -- the Acorn instruments in the first track sound much more like a real xylophone and bass guitar. Or maybe it's meant to be a piano, but it's less synthy.

I have early memories of my parents staying up all night playing Lemmings (on Acorn), and I played it a lot myself once I was old enough, so I'm probably in no position to judge.

I think the Archimedes did have 4 or 8 'native' channels for audio.

From memory the MOD files included with Lemmings on the Archimedes were 3-channel, possibly leaving one free for sound effects.

I wonder if it was disk space. Lemmings for Archimedes fitted on an 800K floppy; did the Amiga version span to two 720K floppies? Losing a load of samples would certainly be a way to drop the space requirements.

The Amiga disk format held 880K. The original version of Lemmings was a 2 disk release with an animated intro, but later (cheaper or pack-in) versions shipped on 1 disk with the intro removed.

The Nintendo DS homebrew port is a port of the Amiga version from what I can tell, with perfectly translated touch controls and the same soundtrack (as in sounds the same, uses the same MOD files)

Lemmings for the Acorn Archimedes was at least as good, if not better: https://youtu.be/ApPGPSH_k7I

The Archimedes had a better CPU, which enabled better graphics. But I never used an Amiga, so I don't know if the videos on YouTube are at the real resolution.

(For those unaware: this is Acorn as in Acorn RISC Machines, an earlier name of Advanced RISC Machines, i.e. ARM.)

That was the only version of Lemmings I'd ever played until I tried the SNES version many years later. I discovered I'd been spoiled by the Acorn.

Anyone going to school in the UK during the 90s will probably have encountered an Acorn.

Does anyone know if the Raspberry Pi will run the Archimedes port of Lemmings?

The Raspberry Pi capably runs the RISC OS operating system natively on its ARM processor, in many ways it could be considered to be the spiritual successor of the Archimedes.

I know the hardware has changed in ways that trip up games, so it's not a guarantee that Lemmings would work. I found some information here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=32036&p=2...

It looks like it works [1].

It's from the "Archimedes Software Preservation Project" [2]. I must get in touch, since a few years ago I imaged most of my Acorn floppy discs, but I haven't done much with them. If the Raspberry Pi makes it very easy, that's great.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nE03GMDK4RA

[2] http://forums.jaspp.org.uk:9000/forum/index.php maybe?

I can now confirm! Lemmings [0] is available for download for RISC OS [1], and with ADFFS [2], and a bit of fiddling if you only have a Raspberry Pi 3 to hand [3] (earlier versions don't need the fiddling), it runs fine, with perfect sound, graphics etc!

I'm very pleased :-D

[0] http://forums.jaspp.org.uk:9000/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=9...

[1] https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-pi

[2] http://forums.jaspp.org.uk:9000/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=3... and http://forums.jaspp.org.uk:9000/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=31...

[3] https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=91&t=1401...

GOG may release it if enough folks vote for it. They specialize in releasing out-of-print games bundled inside of a DOSBox installation:

https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/lemmings

I personally own an old DOS CD-ROM that still works in DOSBox (so you could always go that route until then via ebay etc)

>"If Lemmings was put on sale on GOG for $0.99, I would definitely buy it."

There goes the industry. That'd hardly recoup GOG's costs in licencing it. Is there any way out of this "race-to-free" mentality people have?

> Even if it was $4.99 or $6.99, I would definitely think about it.

Seems like you forgot to include the part that didn't support your complaint.

Fair enough, although that does imply that a higher price would be less likely to result in a purchase

That's generally how it goes with things that cost money

Is it actually that expensive to license a game that's out-of-print? I would've thought they weren't expecting to make make money off of it, so anything is better than nothing.

If Sony own the rights to it why would they let people profit for free instead of doing nothing just in case a great idea comes along got a new Lemmings product?

Doesn't letting people reminisce and share those products with friends/children/whoever mean that the Lemmings brand retains more worth and is more likely to be successfully resurrected?

Logically I'd say yes, but big companies don't really work that way.

GOG have quite a lot of stuff already that they sell at that price point in sales.

>That'd hardly recoup GOG's costs in licencing it. //

Really? Doesn't that just mean that the company selling the license are charging too much?

GOG: Hey, you know that IP you've got locked away earning no money, how about we give you 50¢ every time we sell a copy?

GameProducer: You mean that stuff I made 20 years ago and already earned massive amounts of money on? The IP that's useless for new games. The games holding it that will only be sold to people reminiscing and won't compete against the current titles were selling?

GOG: Yeah ...

GP: No, thanks, I don't like money.

If the cost of licensing to the licensor then it would be possible to do that kind of transaction. Unfortunately it takes time + energy/bandwidth + money to put these kinds of deals together.

50 centers for every copy sold (which would leave 49 cents to cover platform costs, transaction costs, production, marketing etc) is great if you sell a few million units but if you sell a few thousand...

I still have my boxed PC copy: one 3.5" and two 5.25" disks.

I loved this game so much

> font-size: 1.9rem;

I know it's hip these days, but seriously: 2 times my browser's default font size does not improve readability for me.

Using a sans-serif font for long form is not the best choice either

There's not really any evidence for or against that. On lower-resolution screens, sans-serif fonts may be more readable for longform, since serifs often get a bit fuzzy.

On my desktop browser, the font shows ~100 characters per line, which is a bit more than what I've seen the recommended count be for ideal readability:

http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

Font size was never supposed to control characters-per-line. You can set the line width instead (I suppose the best approach is to use rem as unit. I've tried em in the past but it breaks for headings).

It should be assumed that the default size configured in the browser is a comfortable size. Overriding to twice that is idiotic.

Text reading on modern systems has gotten really uncomfortable. I constantly have to switch between text sizes in a range of factor three or more (still use xterm with default bitmap fonts), and most web and UI fonts are way too large and have too much spacing. It's a strain on the eyes and a waste of screen estate.

That has nothing to do with the font size. It just means you have a big (wide) browser window or monitor.

The problem here is some sites having such large text in relation to the web generally, or your OS, that it's ridiculous. The solution is:

- Stick to normal font sizes

- Set a max-width for the text to fit the right number of characters per line

- If users want bigger text, let them change their OS resolution settings or browser default zoom settings

Does that not depend significantly on physical screen size, though? I'd imagine that you'd want fewer larger words per line on a phone screen than you'd want on a 24" monitor.

I think the only reasonable approach applications can take is to layout everything in physical sizes, and to be largely unassuming about the display device (i.e. assume a standard (desktop monitor?) viewing distance). In consequence a sensible default font size would be something like 14pt, etc.

If the results aren't suitable (maybe a desktop monitor is viewed at a larger distance than a phone screen, maybe user is visually impaired, etc) then the OS can still offer to globally or locally configure the screen with a fake dpi.

I'm getting downvoted but I agree with the downvotes (because font-size != chars per line). However, in this case, the site in question has a max-width for the text column. I have a very wide screen but the text column is locked after going past whatever the media query is for iPad-vertical width.

I played it on the Sega Master System.

Freaking downvoters today.

Perhaps they were expecting you to have played it on a BBC? I played it first on an Archimedes just after our school upgraded from BBC Master (IIRC).

Oh I wish! I dreamed of that ha ha

Lemmings is the most accurate way I can describe how people behave in large corporations. But do the younger generations even know what is a lemming and what I would mean by that?

People don't need to have played the game to be aware of lemmings, though their reputation for suicidal behaviour appears to be based on a myth spread by Disney.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/lemming-suicide-is-a-myth-that-was-pe...

When I heard the myth I thought of the Bible story where a demon was cast out of a man and sent into "vermin" which then ran into a lake and drowned.

Probably not, the lemmings jumping off cliffs myth was from was at it's peak in the 50s when a disney movie crew filmed lemmings falling off a cliff with the crew pushing them over it out of shot.

If anything like that was attempted today, the person in charge would probably have to go into a witness protection program.

Do you mean sheep?

At least in German, there's the popular comic "nichtlustig" ("not funny") which has as a recurring theme of lemmings in absurd situations trying to kill themselves. E.g. http://static.nichtlustig.de/toondb/091121.html

Don't suppose that just because the original source of the meme disappeared or hasn't been experienced first hand, it doesn't live on.

In this case, the original source was the Disney documentary (as others have already noted) and the game was already an playful interpretation of it.

I also know several people in their 20s that got handed down an Amiga to play on when they were kids. So even younger people can have played the game and then there have been several remakes (the last I remember is the PSP version from about 10 years ago, although that should also run fine on the current PS Vita).

I actually didn't think of the gregarian aspect. To me lemmings are before anything a video game character that, a mindless creature that will do what it's told with not an epsilon of common sense or self preservation, and no initiative.

That pretty much describes how many people behave in large organisations, where a reasonably smart and educated person will not hesitate in good faith to act against the interest of the organisation if there is a set of policies / personal interest / "it's always been like that" that permits it.

I'm not sure the term "lemmings" has been used at all for this kind of herd behavior as IMO the suicidal aspect is the most important feature if you used "lemming".

I think nowadays "sheeple" is the more appropriate term for that kind of mindless behavior.

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