Keen 9: Battle of the Brains

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Ceilick
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Keen 9: Battle of the Brains

Post by Ceilick »

Firstly: Not starting this yet, I need a bit of a Keen break :) (half a year at most). Also still considering the team idea for getting this one done, have a few people in mind and will be contacting them about it in a couple weeks or so.

Making this topic due to recent plot talk in the dead in the desert topic in the release forum. As I said there, I'm not sure what will happen in my next installment for my take on TUIT.

Some things that are certain:
-It'll be a keen 5 mod
-Keen will fight Mortimer in the end
-If Keen fails the Universe will be toast

I'd like to hear peoples thoughts on: how the story arch of my TUIT is progressing and where it should continue, ideas for keen 9 (story, graphically, enemies, etc), hopes/desires for the final episode, ideas where the game takes place, ideas for what Mortimer's plans are, ideas for what Keen must do, how keen stops mortimer; pretty much anything related to the final episode.

One set of questions to kind of kick things off: Who is Mortimer working with? Does he have an army of robots serving him in the final episode, or is he still tricking and enslaving useful enemy races? Are the Shikadi still involved or did Mortimer abandon them after the Omegamatic? Is Mortimer using the Bloogs? Does he still have some of his
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Post by shikadi »

i don't see what brains and the universe have in similair.

i don't think mortimer wants the shikadi anymore, he would need to many omegamatics, they can "just" kill the milky way, he wants the universe in pieces,many pieces.

why would mortimer even want the bloogs? they can't even stop keen from saving a single human. (maybe he uses bips?)

mortimer is to lazy to make robots himself, maybe he enslave an race to make some destructive robots?
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tulip
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Post by tulip »

The bips could indeed be very interesting, small bips in huge killing machines could look great (I can imagine a shikadi mine replacement steered by a bip). Seeing the Shikadi homeworld like it was suggested in the other thread also sounds interesting to me.
Alien races are almost certainly more interesting to look at than robots (and I prefer a robot that is driven by a bip over a normal robot), and if you still use shikadi I'd be careful not to use them in the way they have been used.
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matonen
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Post by matonen »

Well, if this is going to be the final episode, it would be nostalgic to see some old enemies from the old episodes (bloogs, shikadi mines, krodacians etc.).
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Post by Grimson »

I would really like to take part on this project, if you only allow me to. I'm usually the idea-man (I'm a complete newbie when it comes to actual modding), so I could develop the story and design some of the creatures for you.

In my opinion, Mortimer should have a bunch of robots at his disposal. I think he would already be enough fed up with inferior races, that he wouldn't bother to mind-control them or anything.

The Shikadi could still be in, with Mortimer perhaps deceiving them to believe they could take over the entire universe. Once Keen's neutralized the threat of the Shikadi (perhaps they should have a leader, a secondary boss, which Keen has to defeat), Mortimer reveals his true intentions to the Shikadi - this enrages what's left of the creatures, and maybe they could even help Keen to proceed forward (not that they would necessarily turn "good", but just to help their own survival)
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Post by Mink »

I don't think Mortimer should be using the Shikadi or Bloogs anymore. He'll have moved on after those races failed, just as he did with the Vorticons. However, he should be working with at least one (hopefully new) species of alien. All of the Keen games have one main biological alien, such as the Vorticons in Keens 1, 2 and 3 and the Shikadi in Keen 5. That said, it would be nice to see some robots mixed in.

I'd also like to see Keen's friends involved, if only a little. Why did they contact him at the end of Dead in the Desert? Did they find out something about Mortimer's plans, or are they in danger?

As for setting, I think multiple space ships above a planet would be pretty neat. There could be a few planet levels (enough to justify tileset space) towards the end.

I'm not quite sure what I think about Mortimer's plan yet. Maybe he could have another machine similar to the Universal Toaster Cannon?
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Re: Keen 9: Battle of the Brains

Post by KeenEmpire »

Ceilick wrote: Some things that are certain:
-It'll be a keen 5 mod
-Keen will fight Mortimer in the end
-The Universe is Toast
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Post by shikadi »

maybe the 4 friends of keen are all trapped? so he has to free them, then go to the qed replacement, mort has some new devices (beign the shikadi master replacement, i hope with a lot of patching), then while beign assaulted by mort, keen has to destroy the univesal toaster cannon by the shikadi mine replacement (or when possible to patch, by mortimer himself, :mortlol vs :lol) and that all those devices are (partly) fuelde by the qed replacement.
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Post by Deltamatic »

The Shikadi might have high-tailed it back to their own galaxy (or perhaps sat in jail before high-tailing it back to their own galaxy), but I'm sure that for plenty of them they still have loyalties towards Mortimer. And besides, the Bloogs are boring compared to them. There's still a lot of depth in the Shikadi that hasn't been explored.
I'm not even sure if this is possible, but if some level(s) could have their physics altered to make them be microgravity environments that would be sweet.
I want something more ominous-sounding than "Universal Toaster Cannon" for the vast machine that is charging up for the destruction of reality.
And of course the animation for the universe blowing up/imploding/tearing itself apart/boiling into a void/whatever it's going to do is required to be awesome. :drool
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Post by Mink »

Deltamatic wrote:I'm not even sure if this is possible, but if some level(s) could have their physics altered to make them be microgravity environments that would be sweet.
A very interesting idea, but it probably wouldn't work. If the gravity is changed, it would be the same for all levels.
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Deltamatic
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Post by Deltamatic »

If you can't change the gravity, then could the game activate the jump cheat on level entrance?
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Post by Dynamo »

Why don't make this like Command & Conquer 4.

Let me explain:

In Tiberian Dawn, Tiberian sun and Tiberium Wars Kane's (the evil guy of the game) true reasons behind his decisions are not revealed, and they will be revealed in command & conquer 4 which will see the light on 2010. So why don't you do the same here? In this episode mortimer's true intentions (might it be the fact that Mortimer wants to destroy everything because everything is so stupid, or anything else you want, maybe something bigger behind it would be nice, like someone suggested before, Mortimer wanted to start a new, better universe).

There, I just thought about this plot in about 20 seconds, see if you like it.

"As Keen's friends finally succeeded to conctact him on his new bean-with-bacon megarocket, they tell him about Mortimer's location, and even more. Time before, he built various starships with which he wanted to destroy first earth, then the galaxy. But this time... This time he has built an entire planet! An entire planet made of metal, which can be moved anywhere just like a real starship. Basically till now Mortimer only tricked Keen into going on dangerous planets such as Krodacia and Fribbulus Xax only to take the time he needed to build this planet. Here he is almost finished building the Universal Toaster Cannon with which he will doom the whole universe for ever.

He has to be stopped.

This planet is extremely guarded by hordes of robots (and aliens, if you want, but I'd like the planet to be tech-themed) so it will not be an easy task There are many force fields on the planet which are controlled by computers. You need to take down these computers in order to reach the position of the Universal Toaster Cannon. Be in guard, Mortimer is aware, and awaits you, to finish you off and demonstrate to the whole universe that Commander Keen was nothing but a fool who tried to stop the most intelligent creature in the universe.

Prove him wrong"

Something like this, hope you'll like it. You can of course edit it and whatever else you want.

Again, sorry for my terrible english.

Oh one more thing, I suggest patching the monsters even more than dead in the desert.
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Deltamatic
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Post by Deltamatic »

I second CKeen on the patches.

I'd prefer multiple planets, connected with the elevators, rather than one big planet. That means you could include earth, the Shikadi homeworld, the Martian secret level (via the Korath III teleporter) and Mort's gigantic universe-destroyer all at the same time. Yes, I'm still rooting for the Shikadi homeworld.

Imagine flying metal veins boiling through eons of time, vermilion crystal structures encrusting entire continents, opalescent soil permeated with bioluminescent slime, oceans of void, volcanoes of firefly-like energy motes, swarms of prismatic glass cubes, aurora flowing along the lines of the planet's magnetic field, deadly Shikadi architecture and electrical storms over everything.
Last edited by Deltamatic on Wed Jul 29, 2009 23:05, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Dynamo »

Deltamatic wrote:I second CKeen on the patches.
Thanks : D
Deltamatic wrote:I'd prefer multiple planets, connected with the elevators, to one big planet. That means you could include earth, the Shikadi homeworld, the Martian secret level (via the Korath III teleporter) and Mort's gigantic universe-destroyer all at the same time. Yes, I'm still rooting for the Shikadi homeworld.
Fu.ck the shikadi - They are dead. They only need to accept it and get a fu.cking burial.

: P

Lol apart from jokes, I don't really think adding the Shikadi would be a great idea. I mean, Mortimer hates them (read his letter). This time he is using robots he himself programmed, because he is sure something made by him can NOT fail.
Deltamatic wrote:Imagine flying metal veins boiling through eons of time, vermilion crystal structures encrusting sections of the surface, soil permeated with bioluminescent slime, oceans of void, volcanoes of firefly-like energy motes, swarms of prismatic glass cubes, aurora flowing along the lines of the planet's magnetic field, electrical storms everywhere and deadly Shikadi architecture.
Who says one can't make a mod about the shikadi homeworld later?
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Post by VikingBoyBilly »

What if Mort actually launches the UTC and keen has to create a singularity or a wormhole or something to absorb the explosion before the universe is destroyed? At the end maybe keen could fly through a wormhole or something to get back home but it takes around 20 years for him to come out, but relative to keen, it was only a few moments so he's still 8 years old? This could explain why it seemed to take so many years for keen to finally return.
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