Keen Awards 2025: Nominations

[Soul Monster]

Looks like most of the stuff I would've nominated already has been. I'm probably going to update this list before voting starts, but here goes:

4.3: Most Promising Project

• Keen Meets The Meats Gold Edition by Szemi

4.4: Best Work Of The Hiatus

• Commander Keen's Valentine Bash by Levellass

[Quillax]

I have officially set a deadline for nominations. The nominations process will end on March 7. On that day, I'll start voting as soon as possible. This is final. If there's anything you'd like to nominate, now would be a good time do so. The list of nominations is up to date.

If any of you have played O-Mega-Matic, do you have a favorite level? It would be nice to add some levels to 1.5: Best Galaxy/Dreams Level; we currently only have one. The new level added to The Alphamatic in the version 3.0 beta would be eligible too if anyone wants to nominate that.

Now, as I had promised (and really should have done) earlier, I'll respond to some comments and questions made:

Your nomination is written in plural, yet you linked to only one piece. Did you intend to include the other piece Symphony made as well, or do you want to just nominate the one you put on your post? Just making sure.

Oh, yes, my mistake. I meant to share her post, not just a single image. I'd nominate both of them.

Both of the art pieces have been added to the list of nominations together.

I would like to nominate DoomJedi's Bomberkeen, but which category would it fall into? Fangame, I assume? Or "Really Keen Stuff"? Are fangames a strict 'recreating the Keen engine in a different engine' sort of thing? Since this is more a "Dyna Blaster mod" that's Keen themed. I am guessing not, but I am not sure. Still, I think it's very cool and would like to nominate it for whatever category suits it best.

Edit: Oh, great. Now my brain is registering the fact it's presented as Fangame/Other Mod

I always see fangames as games that take place in the Keen universe and aren't based on the engines used by the official games. This definition can range from platformers that play like Keen but use a new engine written from scratch with unique physics to Keen-themed Pac-Man clones. I mean, in KeenWiki's List of fangames, there are a lot of fangames that are not really platformers but have some Keen imagery. I added BomberKeen to Best Fangame anyway.

Basically, all the mods from this period that I especially enjoyed. Although I have a feeling that "Atroxian Realm" will win handily... well, or "NetKeen".
As for whether to split up this category, I dunno, maybe? I wouldn't mind either way. Might make it more interesting. If you decide to split it at the decade mark ("missed 2000s", "missed 2010s"), if would be easy enough to recategorize the existing nominations. Or, since it's 14 years, you could split it into 7 years each: 2005-2011, 2012-2018.

I know in this forum, a poll can have up to 20 entries. Right now there are 14 nominated for Best Work of the Hiatus. If we exceed 20 then it'll have to be split but right now I think it's fine as it is. If it had to be split, I'd probably do it between Vorticon mods and Galaxy mods, as those are the only works nominated so far. Though, when I set up this category, I had fangames and tools in mind as eligible for it; if this hypothetical split happened I'd probably put those in a "Best Other Work of the Hiatus".

I might make more nominations later on. If I do, should I update this post or make a new post? (Or both?)

You can do it however you'd like. In the past, it was encouraged for people to have all their nominations in one post that they could update whenever they decided to add more. However, in recent years, we've had people make new posts for new nominations. I'll make sure to check through all the posts here regularly in case anyone updated their post, especially when it's time to start voting.

Atroxian Realm was nominated in 2019 for update 1.3, so I don't think it should count. Also, if you're nominating the Alphamatic update, it feels a little weird to nominate the original as well. I'm not the judge, so those are just my opinions.

Perhaps you're right. I do see that Atroxian Realm was not only nominated, but won in 2019. Do you think it should be limited to mods that haven't received an update since then that could have been nominated, or are in the process of getting one? That would disqualify not only "Alphamatic" but "Keen Meets the Meats" as well (to be fair, when first released the latter, for all its brilliance, had major bugs that were only fixed years later by someone else. E.g. Easy mode was not even accessible unless you never saved the game).

I put years next to each of the nominations for Best Work of the Hiatus. These years are for the original releases; whether people want to vote based on those original versions or an updated version made after the hiatus, I think I'll leave it up to them. If we disqualified any mod that had a recent update, we'd be removing so many of them, in large part thanks to K1n9_Duk3's great work in The Great Galaxy-Mod Bug Hunt. Besides, I know a quite a few people were interested in a 2010s Keen Awards because of the idea of "Atroxian Realm vs. Battle of the Brains", and I personally really want to know what the outcome of that will be. I think it'll be quite exciting. Will Keen and Mortimer be able to have their battle, or will Atroxus disrupt it?

By the way, looking back at earlier Keen Awards, I really like the "Poll Results" thread in 2019, in which you could see at a glance not only the winners but how popular the different nominations were. Could that be brought back please? Or perhaps the results can be displayed that way in the "Winners" thread.

You can also see how many votes each nomination received by looking at the individual poll threads. I assume that Grandy02 (back when he ran the Keen Awards) didn't see the point of having a single collective thread for the poll results, and thus didn't do that again after the 2019 awards.

4.3: Most Promising Project

• Keen Meets The Meats Gold Edition by Szemi

Is there any evidence of this being worked on in 2025? Even a plain text message on this forum or the Discord server would do. Or is this being promised in text within the latest updates to Keen Dreams Gold Edition? I'll add it if there's any proof. On this forum, it seems like the last mention of it from szemi is in December 31, 2024.