Benvolio wrote: ↑Thu Mar 25, 2021 11:25
Alright so I've given this mod a good play and it definitely deserves to be played for real. I find this really enjoyable. Snow-themed levels have always been to my taste and this delivers on this bigtime. The "keenishness" factor is through the roof - this is real classic keening. The levels are actually really stimulating in their design: you've nicely struck a good difficulty balance for enjoyment. Copious usage of sliding ice tiles allows for fast paced levels but the implementation is not "sadistic" like some of my own or KeenRush's work. I like your usage of point items - quite original - they're in effect functioning as more of an Extra Life power-up than the traditional small-value Keen point items. Honestly if I was doing a full rating system and breaking things down in that kind of critical detail, I'd give your levels a 9 or 10 out of 10. Your sprites too are great fun and well drawn. I think this project shows huge modding ability and I'd love to see you bring more modding work to fruition.
The game itself feels quite polished and well rounded, at least from what I've seen so far. I like the transition from non-pogoing gameplay to pogoing gameplay, it's quite seamless and really lets you enjoy the lease of life and sense of control that the pogo gives in the Vorticons Keen engine.
Of course there are some criticisms, which are levelled more at your decision-making than at the quality of the project or at your talent as a modder.
Firstly as I think I mentioned with regards the trailer, there's a lot of recoloured original game art here and while it is really nicely done and well integrated into the visual world of the mod, I would still encourage you to explore increasing the amount of custom art. Just to be clear, there is definitely enough graphical work done here for me to call this a "mod"/"total conversion" - I'm not debating that. I just personally find more custom graphics to be more pleasing and exciting.
Secondly, I would regard the mod as unfinished, because although the in-game world including text patches has been brought to completion, the menus and other auxiliary texts have not been altered. This is obviously something you decided not to do - but I encourage you to do this - perhaps even release a "remastered" edition or something. To be fair, in your original post you labelled the mod "ready to [release]", not "finished". But anyway this is not a major criticism because I love the mod. Personally, I find writing a storytext and other bits to be reasonably good fun whilst making a mod, so don't shy away from it in future.
Finally, so far I have seen few glitches. But beware the tile overwriting that the exit doors cause - the wooden background is replaced by cyan tiles to the right of the door when you go into it. This problem is usually easily avoided by reshuffling some tiles in the tileset, or alternatively can be patched. If these options fail, the exit can be put at the edge of the level instead to overcome these issues.
In the most ideal world, a skiing mod could be made with the
V2 modifications, allowing sloped tiles for even more authentic piste action. Your enactment of the skiing environment is definitely great so this is not a criticism in the slightest. I also believe V2 to be quite difficult - I certainly never got the hang of it. But perhaps if ambitious you or someone else could make a sequel using these sloped tiles that V2 offers - it could be quite cool.
Addendum: just noticed the "package" bat file. Whilst nice to have an installer, you could theoretically annoy someone by overwriting their copy of Keen1. (For example in my orignal childhood setup, my only copy of Keen1 was a not completely reliable 5 1/4 disk and loss of the game was a constant fear). Maybe the batch file should have a warning message and a "would you like to proceed Y/N" prompt.
Thanks again for the kind comments and feedback, Benvolio!
Rest assured, that I am planning a follow up release in the near term future. I'm currently on annual leave for the first time since summer. I'll be back at it soon enough.
The next iteration will cover some of the following:
BROKEN SPRITES
Yes, the cyan blocks when collecting items and opening doors is a huge visual bug. I tried working around it as much as I could by placing keys over windows for example.
Alternatively, I could have chosen to not placed doors and collectables in indoor areas but that would have been too much of a design compromise, so I decided to keep the bug in despite breaking the immersion.
I assumed this was just a technicality of Keen 1. Since in the original game there are only two backgrounds - gray and black. All pickups happen to be on a gray background and get replaces by a blank gray (cyan in my case) tile on pickup. My assumption was that all pickups get replaces by the sane hardcoded tile
This V2 mod you linked appears to offer a solution with it's expanded tile sets. I'll see what I can do with it. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
BORROWED SPRITES
During development I considered the usage of Keen 4's tiles in the overworld and Keen 3's tiles in the levels to be a homage/tribute to the original games (Not to mention to mask my lack of spriting ability
). But I see your point. If most of the game uses custom sprites, I might as well go all the way. I will attempt to replace all borrowed sprites with originals.
AUXILIARY SCREENS
You're right. These have been completely overlooked. I apologize for that. They will be updated in the next release. I do like coming up with stories, but I'm not too good at actually putting them into writing. We'll see how it turns out.
USE OF POINTS
Good observation here as well. Points were a late addition to the game. I added them in when I started play testing the entire mod (as opposed to individual levels) and hit some frustrating points. They are, in fact, meant to help the player gain extra lives in case they haven't been saving. At best, I will only tweak the placement of teddys.
I believe the scoring system in all Keen games is a bit paradoxical. A player who dies a lot will repeat levels and collect more points, thus having a higher score than a player who beats the game in one try.
For this reason I decided to guide the player to collecting keys and not points.
PACKAGE.BAT FILE
The purpose of this batch file is to copy all the necessary files for distribution. I don't believe the data loss scenario you are describing is realistic, but nonetheless I will add a segment to the README to explain the folder structure and purpose of the various bat files. And make sure it's not in the final zip.
Thank you for the valuable feedback. It is very appreciated.
Also, since you're a seasoned modder yourself. Can you tell me how I'm supposed to get my game listed on keenwiki.shikadi.net? I have an account for the Wiki, but don't appear to be able to crate new pages. Or I could just be missing something?
Excuses