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My history of level-making


I started drawing levels on paper around 1998 or 1999, and finally downloaded the editor in the summer of 2001. I tried my best to recreate my levels in the editor, but it was hard because my levels on paper were not drawn very well - there were thin walls between 2 tiles, not the same number of tiles from one row to the next, diagonal boots... :-)

I had made around 80 levels on paper. The first set I posted on the newsgroup contained 104 levels - it contained the levels I made on paper (1-8, 10-63, 66-78, 99), and the rest were new, or remakes of CC1 levels. Eventually I was updating this set until August of 2001 (?) until it had 158 levels. This is the set that I submitted for CCLP2. This set is no longer on the Internet.

Some time after this, I realized levels 1-99 of MikeL1 weren't very challenging, so I released another set that was edited versions of levels 1-97 and 99 from MikeL1, called MikeL1 edits. This set had 99 levels and was released in late 2001. (The reason there was 99 levels instead of 98 was that there were two versions of level 26, one of them having had no changes. This is because I think the original MikeL1 level 26 was different from the current version, but I ended up replacing it with level 26 of MikeL1 edits.) This set was removed from the Internet, but was tracked down by John Lewis :-) and can now be found at the Yahoo group in the John's AVIs folder.

After that (or maybe before it), I made a set that was based on CC1 levels (sort of like BasticoP2). I think the original name was MikeL2, but now I currently have it named on my hard drive as MikeL1.5-cc1.dat. It has 64 levels. This set is no longer on the Internet.

After this, I released a new version of MikeL1 with 133 levels. Levels 1-88 and 90-99 of the original MikeL1 remained intact (mostly - some levels had minor changes made such as hints removed), level 89 was replaced, 100-116 and 120 were a few of the better levels from the original MikeL1, and the rest were either new or from MikeL1 edits or MikeL1.5-cc1 mentioned above. This set was updated for a while, and in the final update had 164 levels. This set is no longer on the Internet.

Then I got bored of this set, I guess :-) and replaced MikeL2 (MikeL1.5-cc1) with a new MikeL2, which had 130 levels and marked the first time I ended one of my sets with an unsolvable last level. I released this set in mid-2002, and it was my "CCLP3 candidates" set. It contained many levels from MikeL1, some modifications of MikeL1 levels, and some brand new levels. This set is still being updated, and currently has 200 levels. Two types of levels you will see a lot of in this set are levels with many rooms and levels with toggle walls.

In May of 2006, after it was announced that CCLP3 was going to be Lynx-compatible, I made MikeL2-fix, which was MikeL2 with all levels fixed to be compatible with Lynx. This set is still being updated as well.

In August 2007, I combined all the levels that were not in MikeL2 (some early ones from MikeL1, MikeL1 edits, MikeL1.5-cc1, and some unreleased ones from a set on my computer that I called MikeL4) and released them in a new set called MikeLrejects, at pie guy's site. This set was intended to replace all my older MikeL1 sets. After creating MikeLrejects, I deleted MikeL4.

I also have another level set - ML1. ML1 consists of my favorite levels from all my sets. This set has 92 levels. It's similar to another old set I used to have called MikeL3, which had 99 of my favorite levels and, like ML1, was never officially released. I wish I could release ML1 as a "replacement" for all my other sets, but then a lot of people would have to do a lot of score rearranging. Maybe someday I'll officially release this set if I feel brave enough to face the wrath of angry CC players who had to change or reset their scores... :-) If I do release it (although right now I'm still leaning towards no), it might be accompanied by re-releases of MikeL2-fix and MikeLrejects, the main changes inlcuding renaming the sets to ML2 and ML3 respectively, plus some potential additions to and removals from ML3/MikeLrejects (you know it's a bad level if it's rejected from the rejects set... :-)).

And now I've released *another* level set, MikeL3 (not to be confused with the MikeL3 I just mentioned in the paragraph above). This set contains MS/Lynx compatible levels for CCLP1 consideration that I began working on in August 2011 (and I believe it was the first time I made a new level in over 2 years... :-0).

So, in conclusion :-), I have 9 level sets, all of which were on the Internet at one time, 6 of which are still on the Internet today, 4 of which are the ones I wish were the only ones on the Internet (MikeL2, MikeL2-fix, MikeLrejects, and MikeL3). Actually, what I would really have preferred is if I had waited until now to release any levels - then I could have released ML1 - that way, I would have had a smaller set with levels I like instead of tons of sets with a lot of levels I don't like too much...