Mod, skin, half-mod...what will it be???
- StupidBunny
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Mod, skin, half-mod...what will it be???
So it's not my style to announce things until the moment I release them, but for this project I will make an exception. Some of you might remember Commander Keen in the Bobrick Tower, which I released for the last Keen Day. You might remember how I said it had been in development on and off for almost 4 years before the time I finally released it.
Well, believe it or not, I have another not-abandoned project in the works which is even older, predating The Bobrick Tower in its beginning by at least a couple months and by now close to a year older. The funny thing too is that it has always been more limited in scope: from its inception I have intended for it to be a simple graphics skin of Keen 3, replacing all sprites and tiles but leaving everything else intact.
But as I enter yet another burst of enthusiastic rejiggering and updating of my existing work on this thing I have started considering other alternatives besides a simple graphics replacement. And, as always when we feel indecisive, I turn to the Keen community for suggestions and direction.
I'll establish right now that, even as a graphics skin, the gameplay will be a bit different, since the Keen sprite is now only a tile tall. (Also the meep replacement has a shorter shot but in practice it doesn't seem to change much.) The story I have in mind is silly and very limited, in keeping with the fact that it is originally a skin intended to make Keen 3 look more trippy and weird and colorful. It didn't even have a story in the first place but a half-baked one sort of materialized somewhere in the development process.
And, just for good measure, here is a screenshot as taken in Mr. Black's lovely levelpack, bearing in mind that there are still a couple of things here which will look totally different in the final version. Here is your first glimpse of 30 CAT III: The Hunt For Keen's Head:
Well, believe it or not, I have another not-abandoned project in the works which is even older, predating The Bobrick Tower in its beginning by at least a couple months and by now close to a year older. The funny thing too is that it has always been more limited in scope: from its inception I have intended for it to be a simple graphics skin of Keen 3, replacing all sprites and tiles but leaving everything else intact.
But as I enter yet another burst of enthusiastic rejiggering and updating of my existing work on this thing I have started considering other alternatives besides a simple graphics replacement. And, as always when we feel indecisive, I turn to the Keen community for suggestions and direction.
I'll establish right now that, even as a graphics skin, the gameplay will be a bit different, since the Keen sprite is now only a tile tall. (Also the meep replacement has a shorter shot but in practice it doesn't seem to change much.) The story I have in mind is silly and very limited, in keeping with the fact that it is originally a skin intended to make Keen 3 look more trippy and weird and colorful. It didn't even have a story in the first place but a half-baked one sort of materialized somewhere in the development process.
And, just for good measure, here is a screenshot as taken in Mr. Black's lovely levelpack, bearing in mind that there are still a couple of things here which will look totally different in the final version. Here is your first glimpse of 30 CAT III: The Hunt For Keen's Head:
Last edited by StupidBunny on Tue Nov 27, 2012 20:03, edited 1 time in total.
DAYUMN! Dat terrain under Keen is... triptastic. More of that kind of thing, if you please, you Intelligent Rabbit. The whole thing is amazing. Those things that I am gonna call 'tree-tops' are very Duke Nukum 1. And, is this the first time beer has been an item in a Keen mod?? I recall I sequestered a pint of Guinness or something in the bowels of one of the impenetrable levels of Exiting Epsilon, probably wasn't drunk by very many eight year old genii. So this is probably the first proper beer item. Keen can legally drink even in the US by this stage, surely.
Now we've this to salivate over as well as Vool and... *ahem* Spleen's mods. And probably lots of other things. Full mod for this!
Now we've this to salivate over as well as Vool and... *ahem* Spleen's mods. And probably lots of other things. Full mod for this!
- troublesomekeen
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- StupidBunny
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So in keeping with the public will as well as a new spurt of ideas for this thing, I have decided to make this a full-on mod.
Making the transition from skin to mod will take a bit of a mental push though. I'll need to draw up a .tli file for the tileset, and, more critically, get rid of and replace a bunch of the tiles, some of which I've already redrawn, that will not be used in the mod itself (for one thing, I really don't need two alphabets for this.) From that point I won't be able to test the tileset with the Keen 3 levels very well any more, which will mean more or less that I'll have to begin level building. At least I'll be able to kick that off with a pretty much complete tileset though. It'll also be an interesting challenge working with the diverse but more generalized tiles I have, since most of the works I've released evidence the fact that I like tile specialization a lot, either in terms of specific/one-use tiles or else thematic levels and the like. I don't think that'll be too much of a problem though. This is going to be fun.
Making the transition from skin to mod will take a bit of a mental push though. I'll need to draw up a .tli file for the tileset, and, more critically, get rid of and replace a bunch of the tiles, some of which I've already redrawn, that will not be used in the mod itself (for one thing, I really don't need two alphabets for this.) From that point I won't be able to test the tileset with the Keen 3 levels very well any more, which will mean more or less that I'll have to begin level building. At least I'll be able to kick that off with a pretty much complete tileset though. It'll also be an interesting challenge working with the diverse but more generalized tiles I have, since most of the works I've released evidence the fact that I like tile specialization a lot, either in terms of specific/one-use tiles or else thematic levels and the like. I don't think that'll be too much of a problem though. This is going to be fun.
- VikingBoyBilly
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- troublesomekeen
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Full-scale mod? New ideas? Never-seen-before artwork? Behind-the-scenes? Oh this is splendid! By the bouncing barrels of blarney, bubble over!StupidBunny wrote:So in keeping with the public will as well as a new spurt of ideas for this thing, I have decided to make this a full-on mod. This is going to be fun.
Commander Keen in... Canteloupe Quest!
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