Keen: Modding

Yeah... I'm really confused here. Vorticon elders are in episode 2, and there's no vorticon involvement in this mod to use an actual vorticon elder as a statue replacement for episode 1.

:brainmelt

But this brings up a good question... what exactly ARE the animated statue replacements going to be? Shall we create a couple so there can be a slug and a lick? Or are they going to be patched in some other way?

When I was talking about Vorticon elders, I meant the equivalent of Yorp statues but in episode 2. *reads my post* Yeah, that was worded wrong.

The statues are just things that make messages pop up with some tiles on them, as I understand it. Since each level has a different tileset we could have a different appearance for this message-giving thing every time it comes up in the game. (It could even blend in with the background if we wanted Keen to talk to himself.)

Makes sense.


I have dropbox, how do I find our community folder?

Story's pretty much done, except for what the actual text will be.
And the map is nodally if not spatially outlined.
The only thing being worked on right now is doomjedi making his nifty sprite graphics.

Anything else we could do?

Must be time to get to work on level tilesets. We'll continue to use the original tileset for the map for now, but feel free to contribute tiles for that anyway.

I'll create a new thread for this, where we can specify what kinds of tile are needed for each level.

If anyone wants to create a set of sprites 1SPR0000.bmp thru 1SPR0040.bmp that are just boxes with numbers on them (and a bounding box of constant size, about that of keen), that would me help out with making the new keen behaviours

As it happens I have a utility for just this. I have uploaded it (zipped) to the CKCM folder, do with it what you will.

If you want the graphics changed from Keengraph to Modkeen format, I can do that too.

Thanks!


Also, another request for anyone: Could somebody design a "test tileset" bitmap? The image would include all kinds of normal blocking tiles, including one way tiles, as well as all four slopes (up left, down left, down right, up right), at 1:1, 1:2, 1:4. In addition, all top blocking faces (including slopes) will need to be icy, normal, and slippery.

Nothing fancy is required, just a background, slopes and normal faces indicated by coloured triangles and squares, and some kind of colour code for the ice/slippery/normal. (We will make a tileinfo later).

It would also be good to make a really big test level01.ck1, featuring all kinds of tile combinations that we would expect to see in a mod. (And maybe a simple world map to go along with the level).


Something like this will be very helpful in the future for me or anyone else testing keen/enemy behaviours.

My test mod has a simple map level and a map tileset I was thinking of submitting to the CKCM, I could try making a test tileset if you'd like. (I'd hate to start and see someone else doing it too.)

Alrighty. You're in charge of the map graphics for now. Anything else that's submitted must be filtered through that.

Thanks levellass, that will help out a lot.