Public Commander Keen Forum

The elusive Keen Bio-Menace mod, started last year by myself and Ceilick, with help from ny00123, Mink, Lass, and Mr_M.
You can read about it in this trailer I whipped up.

Trailer: http://youtu.be/Z_03wyRJUkQ

I still hope we finish and release this. I put a lot of work into the tilesets, and Ceilick's character sprites are beyond awesome.

Happy Keen Day, everyone!

If this poll gets over 25 votes for "YES", I will make it my #1 priority to finish this game. Effort included.

Wow....this looks great....the art is fantastic

Man, that difficulty looks insane. That's like one of the later Bio Menace levels, towards the end of the game. Is that only the first level?

The art does look quite good.

It looks and feels like Bio Menace more than like Keen to me, though. The enemies are Bio Menace-ish rather than Keenish.

At 6:55, I notice you can't jump back up that ledge. What if the player misses the flag the first time around (say, by jumping over it), then gets killed before the exit?

... woah...


I love the music!

(Grammar nerd moment: Plural of Skabs should be just that, not "Skab's".)

Not trying to be a dick, but saying I wanted to release the project as-is is a bit disingenuous. As I mentioened awhile back, wanted the team to to pump out a 3-4 level demo...

Anyhow, glad to see the community get a glimpse of this. Very excited about this mod and hope to see it get developed further.

Snortimer wrote:Man, that difficulty looks insane. That's like one of the later Bio Menace levels, towards the end of the game. Is that only the first level?

It's a draft of the the first level. A lot of stuff is crammed in here just for testing purposes.

Ceilick wrote:Not trying to be a dick, but saying I wanted to release the project as-is is a bit disingenuous. As I mentioened awhile back, wanted the team to to pump out a 3-4 level demo...

Oh, sorry. For some reason, I assumed you lost interest in the project and wanted to release a demo as sort of a cop-out.
Regardless, I figured the trailer would be cool because we talked about it last year.

KeeningProduct wrote:I love the music!

Thanks!

Snortimer wrote:It looks and feels like Bio Menace more than like Keen to me, though. The enemies are Bio Menace-ish rather than Keenish.

The tiles were done completely from scratch. I think the sound effects could have a lot to do with the BM feel. And it is, of course, on the Bio-Menace engine.

Paramultart wrote: The tiles were done completely from scratch. I think the sound effects could have a lot to do with the BM feel. And it is, of course, on the Bio-Menace engine.

... which is the galaxy engine

I say no. There are other things that Para and others are working on that I would rather see finished first.

I vote yes! I don't think anyone has seriously worked on a mod with an older Keen. This will be very interesting, and a fresh look at the Keen universe!

I'd like to see a Bio-menace Keen mod, but at present the concept isn't particularly interesting. It doesn't look like Keen; it looks like something you'd expect out of a cliche post-apocalyptic alien story. I'm not saying I dislike the idea of a more mature Keen game (after all, look at Atroxian Realm), but I think it would be better to have something more unique. Maybe the game could take place on a space station or on a dark planet, I don't know.

Even still, what you have here is still impressive. I wouldn't be against a small amount of the game on earth. Seeing those craters in the sidewalks is really impressive. But I definitely agree that this would be too much at once for a first level.

Gridlock wrote:Maybe the game could take place on a space station or on a dark planet, I don't know.

There go our concepts for later levels/episodes!

Also, registered to vote "yes". I definitely want to see this happen.

Gridlock wrote:I'd like to see a Bio-menace Keen mod, but at present the concept isn't particularly interesting. It doesn't look like Keen; it looks like something you'd expect out of a cliche post-apocalyptic alien story.

It looks more like a sequel to Monster Bash to me. Or Dangerous Dave. Definitely not Keen. A lot of mods you can kind of accept them as part of the original story. For me, that's not the case here. So in terms of Keenishness, I say meh. But when it comes to general modsmanship, this is a pretty excellent piece of work so far.

There's kind of a broader issue going on in my reaction to this, I think. Something to do with an outdated attitude that says growing up = becoming disillusioned with idealism and playing Call of Duty because that's what happens in real life and it's pointless imagining anything else.

Also, how convenient that a major "adult" crisis should wait 15 years for Keen to grow up instead of happening when he was 9...

This looks very impressive artwise.

Not Keeny...indeed.

Also, how convenient that a major "adult" crisis should wait 15 years for Keen to grow up instead of happening when he was 9...

How is this an 'adult' crisis or anything different from Keen's previous adventures?

Something to do with an outdated attitude that says growing up = becoming disillusioned with idealism and playing Call of Duty because that's what happens in real life and it's pointless imagining anything else.

I don't see where this is coming from either...

And in general: obviously the art direction creates restraints on level design, but jesus, this is a demo of a test level. Kind of surprised to see comments implying the the whole game is going to be walk right and shoot while on earth.

I'm kind of surprised by the discouraging comments and attitude from Gridlock and Spleen as well.
You would think as fellow modders they would recognize that this is still a very early mock-up of the game and still has a lot of room for leeway for improvement. Seriously, maybe a week's worth of hard work went into this mod, but judging from the votes, it looks like that will be in vain.

Sure, the art direction isn't very Keenish. I'll take the blame for that.
But that was kind of the point of this project. A grittier, more adult take on Keen. You don't have to accept it as cannon, but rather an alternate universe type thing, or you know, just a fun mod.

Since the general attitude toward this mod seems to be outrage that we would even DARE try something different for a change, or shake up the severely overdone standard Keen-game format, that pretty much crushes any motivation I had to ever touch this thing again, so yeah, you win.