Public Commander Keen Forum

Quick update (or lack thereof, I should say)...

There has been little to no progress. For a while, there was hope of a couple of the old Isis team coming on board, which I encouraged, but has not eventuated. The result of this was it just fell off the radar.

On a positive note, GameBird has worked hard creating some music for the game, and we now have 4-5 original music tracks.

Despite how much is done, there is a lot to make the game complete - mainly a few crucial graphics & tilesets, and improved level design.

I am going to try and fix up a few of the known bugs, and release what I have so far. I envision this to be somewhere between a shell and a complete game, with the engine mostly all done, the first few levels mostly there, but not complete. At least this will fulfill the original goal of making the material available.

Perhaps then others might come onboard to help with the final touches.

On another note, get in touch if anyone is interested in making a "world map" for the game. Note in Isis Keen won't walk around the world map, it's just use to display the progress of the game.

It doesn't need to be very complicated or detailed.

Or like this! :P

Thanks for the input, CKeen.

For anyone still interested, a small progress update:

- have added most sound effects (some "borrowed" from the orignal Keens)

- music is in for levels 1-4 (thanks GameBird)

- save game implemented: NB this is not in-level saving, but rather it saves your progress automatically after each level.

- There is an in-level check point system to accommodate for the lack of proper saving

- You can load custom levels (i.e., the demo will be released with instructions on how to edit and play your own levels, which are not part of the campaign game structure)

- dummy world progress map is implemented (I can't draw, but it will have to do for now)

- debug codes are implemented (won't be available for the initial demo), including show hidden areas, jump cheat, keys, lives, health, ammo, etc

- inventory and powerups are implemented (more on these later)

- level stats can be shown (show # items/points/enemies currently collected/killed, out of total numbers)

- level stats are converted to a 10-star "rating" system at the end of each level, which is also saved to the save game file.

that's all for now.

Can Keen's health and inventory be customized for custom levels? That would be great to play with, if possible.

Yes, there are "object" tiles that can be added to the levels to reduce Keen's initial starting health by certain amounts.

Inventory can be added to the custom levels too, of course. Although I might not let all inventory, enemies etc be accessible via the custom levels, since they will not have all been seen yet (depends how many levels we get done).

At the moment though, you can just load 1 custom level. That is, if you had a set of 10 levels to play sequentially, you'd need to load them 1 by 1 in order, it doesn't play them as a "level pack".

Another quick update.

There have been a lot of minor engine tweaks, to make animation/scrolling a little bit smoother, as well as fix some little bugs. All in all, things are going well.

A certain well respected Keener has come to the party and is helping with critical level design & tweaks... I think you'll be pleased with the results!

Stay tuned.

Great news!

ckGeoff wrote:A certain well respected Keener has come to the party and is helping with critical level design & tweaks... I think you'll be pleased with the results!

Hmmm... I wonder who would that be?

Progress on Isis IIa remains steady. Apart from a lot of "behind the scenes" (tweaking the game physics/mechanics, enemy behavior, etc), I am happy to report the game compiles on OS X!



Full size screenshot at:

http://img695.imageshack.us/img695/9054 ... 617osx.png

This looks great.

If you need some specific graphical tidbits gimme a message, and I'll do some.

That's great news!
This could be the first Keen fangame to have a non-windows/dos release.

Yep... it will be interesting to see if it can reach a wider audience!

It can also theoretically run on Android devices - although of course it would require the entire input mechanism to be re-written, so don't hold your breath for that!

Wow lut? Android!
I'm holding my breath If you do this, you surely will reach wider audience. However I'm not sure how the platform gameplay and controls will work, but that's another story.