Public Commander Keen Forum

While there's been attempts to remake Keen 1 in other engines, I'm making a skin mod that replaces all of the graphics of the original Keen 1 for fun. I'm planning to do the same for Keens 2 and 3 after this.

Here is some of the work I've done. A lot of the graphics here still haven't been replaced yet.

Yes! A graphic overhauled skin mod. That's a neat idea and looks very promissing.
The Teddy looks excellent.

Oh this looks amazing. One issue I've always had with Keen 1 is that it doesn't feel very immersive. The graphics in the levels just don't make you feel like you're on Mars, the mysterious Earth-like planet that everybody wishes they could see. Especially the new ground tiles and the world map stuff look great, the highlights on the city domes for example are excellent.

Oooooh I love the richness of your color choices, amazing how lively the same items look with a bit of clever shading.

I'm with Nospike, I always thought Ep. 1's portrayal of Mars was a bit flat. Just your red soil texture by itself fixes that a lot, it looks like actual Martian regolith now instead of just, like, a flat red thing. Excited to see what else you can do just with a reskin.

Out of curiosity are you thinking of changing the sky texture at all? Obviously there's not a whole lot of feasible options with 16 colors and a simple reskin but I always felt like the gray sky was also not very Martian (and kind of lifeless besides).

Pandakeen wrote: ↑Tue Aug 24, 2021 18:07

I can't get over how metal this soda can is.
For real though. The colors make it look like it's actually got a metallic label instead of just being matte plastic or something. These things have got material to them. I didn't realize that was possible in EGA. And the Everclear looks like it's made of crystal.

The teddy bear looks so round and squishable now. As a teddy should be.

yeah, the tin can looks indeed excellent! it has so much depth and detail. your shading skills are really impressive

Thanks guys

StupidBunny wrote: ↑Wed Aug 25, 2021 14:54 Out of curiosity are you thinking of changing the sky texture at all? Obviously there's not a whole lot of feasible options with 16 colors and a simple reskin but I always felt like the gray sky was also not very Martian (and kind of lifeless besides).

Well, I guess yellow is the closest you can get to the Mars sky color with the EGA palette. But I'm not sure if that will look right.
There will be 2 versions of this: one that adds new tiles and modifies the levels accordingly, and one that's compatible with all Keen 1 mods that don't change the graphics. The former will add more details to the sky, such as clouds.

Pandakeen wrote: ↑Thu Aug 26, 2021 18:33 Well, I guess yellow is the closest you can get to the Mars sky color with the EGA palette. But I'm not sure if that will look right.
There will be 2 versions of this: one that adds new tiles and modifies the levels accordingly, and one that's compatible with all Keen 1 mods that don't change the graphics. The former will add more details to the sky, such as clouds.

Oooooh I didn't realize you were also gonna have a version with levels modified to include extra tiles! Now I'm triply excited Can't wait to see how you Mars it up.

That's fine re: the sky, you're probably right that light gray is as good as you can do without making it look weird or having a game that's too red.
I guess after looking at your tiles I figured you'd have some sorcery at hand to pull of a sky that looked just right. I mean I'm still squinting and trying to convince myself that you only used 16 colors in these

Very cool idea, looks much better!

Well someone has been trying to convince me that the yellow sky might look good after all.



I'd probably only do this in the version with extra tiles because a few locations are dependent on the gray sky. The tile-for-tile remake would just keep the gray sky. Any thoughts on this?

my suggestion would be to change the games colour palette slightly to make things look even more Mars like. There already exists a patch that allows modification of the default 16-color EGA palette which could come in handy. https://keenwiki.shikadi.net/wiki/Patch ... rs_-Keen_1

to give an example here's a quick and dirty colour swap:

This gave me a pang of nostalgia... the first thing I ever did in Modkeen was change the pale grey background to yellow. It looked a lot like your screengrabs... this of course gave rise to "Vanished to Venus".

Leaving that vignette aside, I like Nisaba's suggestion. It's hard to know what would give the most mars-like colour. A sprt of peach-colour could be tried but I would suspect it might look bizarre unless perhaps a low saturation (i.e. greyish) one was found.

This project is a cool one for sure and I look forward to watch it progress towards completion!

I'm just saying, yellow works as an appropriate color for the Mars sky and it also makes sense as a warm light color for a lamp:


Yeah, it is quite a bit brighter than the default gray, but maybe it'd just take some getting used to.



Though yeah the ice tiles... might not fit in as well there...

Nisaba wrote: ↑Tue Aug 31, 2021 19:23 to give an example here's a quick and dirty colour swap:

I was aware of the palette patch, and considered using it but I wanted to push the limits of EGA without changing the palette. That and the graphics I've drawn are tailor-made to the default EGA palette's colors, some things might not look right with a changed palette.
I could have a seperate version with a changed palette that's forked from the extra tiles version, and have 3 versions...

Pandakeen in 2 years wrote:Wed May 18, 2033 3:33 OKAY GUYS I JUST FINISHED MY 7TH FORK OF KEEN 1 REDRAWN ZORPS

Nice.