The creation of this mod

The Commander Keen Community Mod!
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pizza2004
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The creation of this mod

Post by pizza2004 »

This mod is clearly on its way to being something incredible. As I have suggested elsewhere, there should perhaps be a prequel of sorts just to help in telling the story. This would have to use one of the Vorticons engines.

I, however, believe that a "Community Mod 2" should be made once this one is finished, and that one in turn would be based on the Galaxy engine. As to whether or not that would be a trilogy and include the Aliens game in a modded version would be up for debate. This one would once again need a story, but the Gnostiscenes will be exhausted by then. We could instead have Keen in an entirely unexplored area of story as far as Keen goes, having some sort of story occurring on earth that would help to shape things overall and provide a little more back stories for the games overall, therefore fleshing them out.

And I have just had a brilliant idea come to my mind. If someone were to contact Tom Hall, we could perhaps get him in on the making of something in some of these mods, although perhaps unofficially. Although I don't know how open to this he may be, but I think it is worth a shot and as such I am going to try this myself. I think he would love to come up with something, even if it was deemed unofficial, and if he was involved it may well not be. This seems to be something that will have to be looked into.

Also, there seems to be too much inconsistency in the overall development of this mod. May I remind you that something like 5 people created these games in like 3 months and they are extremely popular. Now if we look at the 6 years this mod has been taking and the amount of progress that has been made it could be considered very pitiful. I would just love to get more people involved in this, and have a slightly more consistent development cycle. So as such I hope someone responds to one of my ideas positively! That is all I have to say for now.

Edit: Looking into it, the best place for this mod trilogy to occur would be after Goodbye Galaxy! and before Aliens Ate My Babysitter! It could explain why Keen didn't read the letter, and then lead into the Aliens plot line with the final one explaining why the parents go out and Keen needs a babysitter. Then when The Universe is Toast! Is eventually made, we will have a nice story to flesh out the entire series into. Then there would be a lot of backstory on Keen by then, and if we did get Tom to help out, these would be magnificent additions to the Commander Keen cannon that would be enjoyed by Keen gamers for a long time to come. This seems like something Tom might actually like to collaborate in, let us hope that he will agree to help out a little. And when Tom gets the creative rights to Commander Keen back, then they could even be marketed as official games if they are good enough. They would probably be something like Keen Dreams is Keen 3 & 1/5, with the CKCM being Keen 3 & 2/5-4/5 and then Keen 4 would be the one we know and love, and then Keen 5 & 1/4-3/4 finally coming to Keen 6 being the last one we have in the series to date. This could all also be simplified by simply renaming them thusly: Keens 1-3 are still 1-3 but now it could be Invasion 1-3, Galaxy 1&2, Dreams, Aliens, and CKCM (Title TBD) 1-3 and CKCM2 (Title TBD) 1-3. This would make this a little more consistent if they did become even semi official, but yeah now I am just rambling on and wishing so I think that I will stop. Oh, and sorry if I sounded rude earlier in the post, I didn't mean to, I'm just kind of thinking that this place needs a little bit of a pick me up!
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CommanderSpleen
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Post by CommanderSpleen »

I think throwing a Galaxy mod into the mix for this project would set it back even further still. The storyline of Shadowlands (Keen1), Underground (Keen 2), City/Oracle (Keen 3) remains an appealing plan to me.

Getting Tom involved would be an interesting idea, but not until we have something more concrete.
May I remind you that something like 5 people created these games in like 3 months and they are extremely popular. Now if we look at the 6 years this mod has been taking and the amount of progress that has been made it could be considered very pitiful.
Keep in mind, the original games were being made by people who were getting paid, each had very specific jobs, and were all working within the same geographic vicinity. We are a group of volunteers loosely scattered about the globe, and no one person is entirely responsible for a given task.

Ask yourself this: What would you like to contribute to the mod? Perhaps you could offer refinements to the story or map, sprite ideas or level themes, for example. And of course, we're always looking for new graphics.
pizza2004
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Post by pizza2004 »

I would love to contribute to the mod, and mainly the story. I'm not the best with graphics. But there might be a slight chance I could get my brother to help with graphics (utterly remote chance more like it).

As for the Galaxy Mod thing, I mean not until this one is completely finished, and therefore at most a little bit of story would come up here.

I am thinking of perhaps adapting Commander Keen into books, and as such would love to work out intricacies and little details for these games, as well as doing whatever I can to help the overall development. Sorry I can't help very much, but I'll do what I can!
levellass
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Post by levellass »

I must say, the progress on this is disappointingly slow; I suggest we start up some sort of schedule, so that we can nudge people along, maybe even assign tasks so that we can at least do more than trickle along here.

I've seen too many project (Many of my own!) simply fall apart due to lack of progress, let's not do the same thing here.
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Tulip
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Post by Tulip »

You're right, we're incredibly unorganized.

Why don't you start out and give us the variations of Ceilicks mountain, for which you volunteered for here: http://www.keenmodding.org/viewtopic.php?t=47&start=45

Also I think you shouldn't always ask if you should do anything like making graphics, because the answer will always be yes. Just do it and we'll all decide if we like it.
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CommanderSpleen
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Post by CommanderSpleen »

And even if submitted graphics don't get used, at least they can be used as concept art to inspire more ideas, or modified into something more suitable.
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