Idea for revitalizing the level pack scene

Anything related to Keen Modding.
Post Reply
User avatar
Fleexy
Site Admin
Posts: 490
Joined: Fri Dec 12, 2008 1:33 am
Location: Bloogton Tower

Idea for revitalizing the level pack scene

Post by Fleexy »

It seems that there's been a slowdown in modding releases compared to a few years ago. I also observe that the complexity and development time of mods has gone markedly up since the times of frequent releases. I think it would be great if we could encourage people (from experienced modders to occasional tinkerers) to create and share new Keen levels more often, making the Keen world more vibrant and attracting new people. To that end, I thought of the following system:

I imagine a repository of individual levels: no graphical or gameplay changes and no enforced interdependence between levels. I'd like to keep it simple, at least at first, so people don't feel pressured to make a whole mod before showing what they created. Users would upload a level plus just some simple metadata: name, description, maybe some tags. Optimally, level editor programs (or extensions thereof) would make this really easy: log in once, then there's a Publish button all ready to go. (So far, this is a Mario Maker-like deal, I think, though I've never actually used that.) Level revision would be supported, and other users could fork levels to suggest improvements or put a new spin on it; the chain of authors and changes would be preserved. Collaboration by granting write access on the canonical entry to other users might even be feasible, though live AbiathRPC-style work would be tricky. (These parts are like GitHub.) There could even be a section of the site for unfinished but playable levels, a workshop. Of course, there would also have to be separation by episode.

Players would have a convenient desktop program to browse the library. When they select a level, the launcher would download it, create a new Keen environment from it and game assets and a DOSBox installation provided by the user at setup time, then run the game opened directly to the level using the tedlevel switch. It might even be possible to play in browser with the web version of DOSBox. This would remove the hassle of downloading and extracting and generally assembling a traditional release.

So, what do you think? Would you be interested in leveling for or testing this platform? Any suggestions for refinement would be appreciated. If I were to start building it, I would first want a few committers to help get it furnished with some content before the public opening.

Shout-out to Nisaba for suggesting something quite different that nevertheless sparked this idea.
User avatar
Nisaba
Posts: 320
Joined: Fri Jan 01, 2016 11:15 pm
Location: patch.pat
Contact:

Re: Idea for revitalizing the level pack scene

Post by Nisaba »

Post Reply