hello fellow players,
so umm, i've been playing lasertank at small doses for years. i've solved well over a thousand levels of varying difficulties, though mostly in the older level files.
i guess i will divide this message in three parts to make it easier to read and address.
part 1.. i suck specially bad at solving elaborate "tricks".
i have gone through tutor and tutor with playbacks many times, but for some levels i don't even know what i want to set up.
see, for example, Challenge-V#0208 (A Series of Tubes), "Medium".
of course, the level looks like just one big trick. so, what the hell? how am i going to both pass and push something (O15?) through the M4 corner? one way is to push it under, but i don't see how.
also, take these levels by xyj/clown where you jump into a conveyor and "hope for the best", how do i even approach them?
even though a lot are rated "Easy", i just find myself repeatedly failing miserably and sometimes (rarely) succeeding by total blind luck.
i'm not asking for specific hints or solutions.
just what could be wrong with my thought process? i just don't get these things and it's not letting me enjoy the newest level files, it's that sinking feeling of "i can't even try this level out".
part 2.. let's move on to level creating.
(un)fortunately i'm very uncreative, so i had not made anything over these years.
however, i am getting the feeling that there's not a lot of activity recently, so i felt like i should step in.
i have submitted two "mods" ("Coastal Database" and "Down the Creek"), and i have three levels ready for this month.
how do you go about creating a level? do you come in with the idea ready, or do you get the idea from something that you could do in a level that you solved, or what else?
you can see that this is how "Down the Creek" came to be. i figured that you could further restrict the solution and i also wanted to force the player to place the downward ATs at a certain specific time, so the most interesting way i found to do that was with a trick.
as you can guess from part 1, i wouldn't enjoy trying to solve that level :p so congratulations to Squïrrel (and others?) for seeing through all that.
part 3.. about difficulty ratings.
it seems clear to me that the standards nowadays are very different than they were in the 2000s, and a lot of levels that were "Hard" and "Deadly" in LaserTank.lvl (specially in the first 200) wouldn't hold up to today's "Hard" standards.
i see that some levels have already gotten the hammer.. i remember that #0184 (Fort Knoxious) used to be "Deadly"! it amazes me that it was "demoted" as i think it's one of the hardest ones in the first 200.
is that intentional (like "recent level files are meant for experienced players") or just a side effect of the people that are currently actively solving (and rating) levels being really good at the game?
one rating category that scares me nowadays is "Easy". it's like "Easy" can mean anything from "Kids" to "Medium that is too easy for this solver".
if you wanna see what i mean, just scroll down the list of levels in Sokoban-II until level 250 or so. see how many MASSIVE blocks of "Easy" are there? that's not right, a number of them should just be "Kids", a few should be "Medium", i think.
also interesting is looking at LaserTank#0016 (Sokoban2) and LaserTank#1777 (Sokomamia 6). they are the same level, but one is "Medium" and the other is "Easy"!
if you want some insight into my "style", as a solver, i enjoy mostly clean-looking no-tricks "Medium" and "Hard" levels.. though maybe i am spoiled by the standards of the old school and that'd be more like "Easy" (considering the caveat mentioned above) and "Medium" nowadays.
my favorite authors are Simeon for "casual" difficulty and Kheper for "tough" difficulty.
out of the "new school", some levels that i like that come to mind are Challenge-V#0016 (Without Dearth 3), Challenge-V#0287 (Without Starter 3) and Sokoban-II#1360 (without manes 2).
thanks for reading (if you did). i only wrote all of this because i am somewhat passionate about the game :p
~Haruka