I'll preface this by saying, I'm not sure if/when I'll do further work on this project. Interest just doesn't seem to have been all that high, which kind of means I'm not super motivated to put further work into it as opposed to learning other new things or spending time on other projects. With that being said, there's always the chance that I might wake up one day and decide "I feel like polishing CKGR a bit more today", or that the level of interest changes in the future, etc; not to mention it's open-source so there's always the possibility that someone using it as a base for their own work or similar makes changes based on this feedback, or even that someone making an entirely unrelated project finds something useful to take away from the discussion. So for this reason - I still fully encourage public feedback, positive or negative.
This isn't something that crossed my mind, but should actually be relatively simple to implement and I don't see it doing any harm.Hi namida!
Thank you for providing that new version of Galaxy Reimagined. I have played the game a bit and I have some constructive criticism:
- The game doesn't allow me to simply hold down the up key while walking towards a door or a switch. I have to stop walking and then press up.
Jump buffering did get brought up during the beta period. Based on feedback, I did implement this to an extent - but only within a certain period prior to landing.- The game doesn't let me "buffer" a jump. If I hit the jump key before Keen lands, Keen will not jump until I release the jump key and hit it again.
These control issues wouldn't be quite as bad in a "normal" Keen game that gives the player the ability to stun enemies right away. But this game forces the player to avoid enemies and then places enemies near doors and switches. Being hurt (or killed) because of clunky controls isn't fun.
Keen should automatically dismount a pole if he climbs it all the way to the ground (ie: don't even need to press left or right; just keep going down until he hits the ground). Or are you saying that if he's *close*, he should be able to just start going left or right as if he were standing? If so, yeah, that shouldn't be too hard to do.- In the original Keen: Galaxy games, I can press left/right when Keen is on a pole and his feet are close to a floor that Keen can stand on to make Keen get off the pole. It feels strange to be forced to hit the jump key to get off the pole.
The issue I see with that is, how "smart" should it be, and at what point do we encounter the situation of "there's always something else that can reasonably be argued should be taken into account"? The idea also crossed my mind of having a user-selectable option that restores the official game behavior here, possibly together with the ability to hold a certain key while climbing down to *prevent* Keen falling off (in case there's an occasional situation where the player does still want to look down).- I can see that you made Keen stop at the bottom end of a pole instead of falling off, perhaps to allow the player to look down without falling down, but maybe a "smart" exception that lets Keen fall off when there is a (non-deadly) floor to land on within 2 or 3 tiles below the pole could be implemented.
Hm, I think I'd like to get feedback from more people on this one before I decide on whether changes should be made here. The other thing that comes to mind is that eventually, most such jumps are going to be performed with the pogo anyway, from which Keen won't directly grab a ledge - so at that point, the player pretty much controls (by virtue of being on the pogo or not) whether ledges get grabbed.- Keen grabs edges while still jumping up in this game. In the original games, he can only grab edges while falling. There are positive and negative aspects to this. If Keen is not going to be able to land on the edge anyway, then grabbing it on the way up saves me some time. But if Keen would have been able to make the jump, the edge grab and climb animations might take longer than the jump would have. I can also see this becoming a problem if there is an enemy coming after Keen: If Keen grabs the edge instead of continuing to jump and then land on top, the enemy might touch and hurt Keen while he's climbing up.
Honestly, this felt a bit awkward to me too at first. There is a kludge - not exactly the same in nature - on some wider enemies (like the flying blue bird, the dopefish, etc) for this sort of situation actually; doesn't completely prevent it but reduces the severity of it. On the flipside, I eventually just accepted this as a mechanic during development, and designed the levels around it - including at least one case where there's an area that you're specifically unable to enter from one side due to this. But it's probably not impossible to redesign the relevant parts if need be.- In this game, Keen "slides off" edges instead of landing on them when he didn't make it far enough onto the edge to actually land on it. This also happened in Keen Dreams, but Keen 4-6 had a "kludge" that moved Keen far enough onto the tile to land if he would slide off otherwise. If you decide to implement this, please make sure it will only move Keen onto the edge if Keen is facing/moving in that direction. The original Keen 4-6 only did this for tiles with a flat top edge, since slopes can make it more difficult to detect if it is necessary to move Keen.
I should probably do some kind of proper Help, yeah. Not sure if I'll go to the extent of making it in-game though, maybe a (modern equivalent of) an included help file is more likely here.- The game could really use a help section. What are those color-coded exclamation marks over certain levels on the world map supposed to mean? What does the star rating mean? Where am I supposed go after Slug Village? Can I even "beat" certain levels when I don't have any ammo? I feel like I'm playing a pirated version of a cryptic game for which I don't have a manual. This might provide a sense of nostalgia for some people, but this is not what the Keen: Galaxy games were like at all. They always came with either a built-in help section or a printed manual.
Regarding those questions:
- Exclamation marks indicate levels that are useful to visit at the moment. Red = a level that blocks your path (ie: more levels become accessible purely by beating it, without any need to obtain specific items in it etc) *and* you have all items necessary to beat it. Green = contains a gnosticene (or similar collectible) that you can obtain with the items you currently have. Blue = contains an item (like the pogo or stunner) that you can obtain with the items you currently have.
- Star ratings indicate how difficult the level is.
- Technically, there are only two levels you need to use the stunner in (the one it's obtained in, which can be beaten without using it by abusing the grace period after losing a life; and the penultimate level, which absolutely requires it).
In the meantime, let's just add some notes on this into the first post; better than nothing.
I will mention that even once you do obtain the stunner, evasion is still the primary means of dealing with enemies, so if you're not keen on that, this game might not be for you. You start levels with a certain amount of ammo (6 on easy, 5 on normal, 4 on hard), and pickups do exist but are fairly uncommon and only give one extra ammo each.
Good idea.- Having Lindsey just vanish into nothing seems a bit clunky. I used the Treasure Eater's smoke sprites when Lindsey vanishes in FITF, maybe you could do something similar.
The current animation pretty much just cycles through the frames. I did think something felt a bit weird about it, but couldn't really put my finger on why.- The walking animations on the world map could use some polish. It looks like Keen is limping when you walk northwest or southeast. If you don't want to look at the reconstructed source code, I would recommend that you record some video footage (CTRL+ALT+F5 in DOSBox by default) of Keen walking around on the world map in the original games and then go through the video frame-by-frame in VirtualDub to find out what the walking animation really looks like in the original game. I used a similar approach when I wrote ReDuke. You can also enable the slow motion cheat in Keen, that might already be enough to spot where you might have taken the wrong approach in your implementation without having to use video capture.
This is kind of getting into the "it's never going to be an exact clone" realm IMO. Keep in mind that I generally avoided referring to reconstructed/etc source code of the official games here, firstly to avoid the risk of GPL contamination but also because I was more interested in just making the game fun (and the learning along the way) than necesserially being an exact remake.- I felt like the rules for when the Lick starts an attack differ slightly from the original Keen 4 behavior, or maybe it was a matter of different hitbox sizes. In any case, the Lick hit me when I thought I was safe. But then again, I usually don't let the Licks live long enough to actually start an attack when I play Keen 4. If your game had given me the ammo to stun the Lick, I probably wouldn't have noticed any difference between your implementation and the Keen 4 version.
Firstly - they're still a tile hazard here too. To be honest - I'm not sure what the outcome is in the official games in this situation. I recall that I specifically set it this way so that when a trap of this kind was 2 tiles above the ground, Keen couldn't stand upright under it but *could* duck under it (by looking down). You're right though, this does look really awkward here when I pay more attention to the visual rather than just physics aspects. That particular spear trap that got you doesn't really matter that much if Keen can stand under it or not; I would need to check if any other deadly tiles do before I make changes here. (One option is altering Keen's hitbox; another is making it so that only the inner, say, 12x12 area of such a tile actually functions as deadly.)- I tried to give your game a second chance after my visit to the pogo room (see below) and played a bit of the Moon Pyramid level. I stepped up to the floor below the retracting spear and got hurt by it, even though the visible pixels of that spear definitely didn't touch Keen's sprite at all. This would have been impossible in Keen 4, because the spear is a tile hazard, so it would be aligned on a tile boundary and would never hurt Keen in such a situation. Since Keen's hitbox is less than two tiles high, the spear could never be one pixel above Keen's head and still hurt Keen. I might be more forgiving about this and accept it as your game/level design if you had used all-new graphics assets instead of making a Keen game. But when this happened, the word "bullsh*t" left my mouth and my fingers landed on ALT+F4. Presenting something that looks familiar but follows significantly different rules is just unfair.
Story-wise, he starts without a functional neural stunner. He can have a functional one again fairly early in the game though. However, "enemy blocks the path until you can shoot it" is not a common setup in this game - it happens almost immediately after the functional stunner is obtained, to make sure the player does pick it up and is aware of how to use it, but that's pretty much it.- I don't like the fact that Keen starts with no ammo and that there don't appear to be any ammo pickups (at least not in the level I've played). Keen has always been about shooting at the right time, and sometimes about deciding which enemies to shoot and which ones to avoid to save ammo, but they have never been about being forced to avoid all enemies because the game didn't give you any ammo at all. I could perhaps live with a severely restricted ammo limit that can be increased by collecting bigger/better weapons or power cells for the stunner, but not this. I think it's a terrible introduction for a Keen game. If you want to make things interesting, you could put a more powerful weapon (with severely limited ammunition) in one of the later levels and make that weapon kill the unstunnable enemies like the Dopefish, Arachnut, Bird, Robo Red, Bobba and whatnot. That would also allow you to block certain passages with an enemy until the player has the resources to overcome that obstacle.
Checkpoints on collecting an item is an idea that seems good at first, until you consider the impact on replaying the level: The item won't be there anymore when you come back a second time (because you already got it), so you now have to do the level with one less checkpoint. If you come back for 100% completion purposes later, or just to get something you couldn't get the first time... replacing it in such cases with a regular checkpoint could resolve this, but most of these items have a checkpoint pretty near by anyway (in some cases it does end up as a choice of "do I get the checkpoint before the item, or after coming back from wherever the item is", Lifewater Oasis included).- Your levels could use some better difficulty balancing. I made it to the pogo stick while playing on easy(!) and that's where I gave up. Combining enemies that require precise timing to get past (Mad Mushroom) with enemies that erratically fly around (Skypest) is just awful to begin with, but setting this up over a damage floor that might as well be instant death is the game design equivalent of a gigantic middle finger to the player. There is nothing fun about that section and you don't even have the courtesy to let the level end when I grab the quest item (you know, like Keen 4 & 6 used to do when you collect such an item). You don't even give me a checkpoint when I pick it up. There was nothing even remotely fun up to this point, at least not for me, so I stopped playing.
You're right though that this room is a major pain. It's already been nerfed in difficulty (even on Hard) a couple of times, but maybe further changes are needed still...
Well, in fairness, it doens't tell you because it didn't make it clear what the !'s above levels mean. So making that clearer (via a "help file") should improve this situation - then players would know (or at least easily figure out), complete Slug Village, then if you want to get some of Keen's usual abilities ASAP, look for the levels marked with blue !'s (which will be, once Slug Village is out of the way, Lifewater Oasis first, for the pogo, then Pyramid of the Moon second, for the stunner - you won't be reaching the stunner without the pogo).Don't get me wrong, I think that it could be fun to search for special items that unlock parts of other levels that you can revisit later to reach new sections of these levels. I bought 11 LEGO games that kind of work like this (LEGO Star Wars 1-3, Indiana Jones 1+2, Batman 1+2, Harry Potter 1+2, Pirates of the Caribbean, Lord of the Rings) and I 100%-ed all of them. But your level design and the decision to not give me any ammo makes me want to play those games (or basically any other game) instead.
If your game had told me where to find ammo, so that I had some indication as to how much crap I would have to suffer through before I could start playing something that resembles a real Keen game by more than just looks and sounds (in other words: when the game *might* start being fun for me), then I might have continued playing. I think opening the game with a more linear worldmap design that leads players to where they get the stunner and then makes the rest of the levels accessible would make the game much more enjoyable. It would also make the difficulty easier to balance if you know exactly which levels would have to be played without the stunner and which ones would be played with it.
I wonder if perhaps the help should explicitly spell out the few "first steps" for the player - "start with Slug Village, then you need to grab at least the Pogo, preferably the Stunner too, and rescue two gnosticenes, the ones you can rescue at this point are in levels X, Y, Z". The ! hints would reveal most of this information anyway, albeit progressively, but perhaps something more direct for the start of the game is worthwhile?
Nothing that isn't connected to secret levels requires abusing the grace period / non-one-hit-deaths, though it is an option in some places like this. Coming back with ammo is an option as well. As is simply timing things very well.Even little things like signs that mark the passages that the players shouldn't even try to explore before they find a certain item could already help a lot. I found a switch in Hillville that has a slug next to it, which makes it almost impossible to flip that switch without getting hurt. Am I supposed to just take the damage (given that Keen doesn't die in one hit anymore) and quickly hit the switch or am I supposed to skip that section and return later when I have a weapon?
I went for a bit of a different philosophy here - initially, I didn't have difficulty modes at all. They were quite a late addition to the game; the "one-size-fits-all" difficulty from prior to that became Normal, so it's by far the most tested. On the other hand, most beta testers played on Easy, so I would've thought if anything was considered too hard even there, it would've been flagged. All sections of the game have been tested multiple times on Normal, including one full-game-no-cheats run; Easy and Hard have only had general testing (eg. "does the spawning different enemies work?") and testing of individual segments / levels. I'm quite open about this - Normal is still the intended way to play, and the others are just there for people who find that too hard (or too easy) but aren't as well tested.I have come up with a general guideline for difficulty balancing: You as the designer -- who knows every level inside and out and who knows how the enemies will behave -- must be able to beat a level ten times in a row without dying when playing on easy, otherwise it definitely needs to be redesigned. It doesn't really need to be exactly ten times in a row, the point is that the most experienced players should have absolutely no problems at all when playing on easy. Hard can be as hard as you want, but you need to be able to complete the game on hard at least once (without cheating) to make sure that it is possible to beat it. Normal mode can be anything in between these two extremes, but I would recommend something where the expert player's success rate is above 70%. If you know any better rules for balancing the difficulty, then feel free to share your thoughts.
I wrote this message because I think that the game could be much more fun (at least for me) if these points got addressed in a major update. The potential for a much better game is definitely there. I could just have deleted the game, but I wrote this message instead.
-- K1n9_Duk3
As mentioned, it's uncertain whether I will do any more updates (I'll likely do the help file at least, eventually), but if I do, you've definitely raised some good points here.
