Fangame or mod ideas - Where from?

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SkypestB2 Vortininja Posts: 32 (8/1/04 6:34 pm) Reply	Fangame or mod ideas - Where from? Where did you get your basic idea for making a fangame or mod? Actually a dream inspired Keen in the Bronze age... My dream was: I was in the Bronze age with Keen, went into a cave, it was quite dark, but I could still see Keen marching through a door. I followed him, but actually crashed into water. It was pretty deep, but I could weirdly breathe. When I arrived from the water I saw Keen shooting at Caesar, and Mortimer jumped out of an android that was to be Caesar. Than I woke up. Message ends...
KeenRush Vorticon Elite Posts: 6716 (8/1/04 7:04 pm) Reply	Re: Fangame or mod ideas - Where from? Hehe. I'm not sure actually.. My ideas haven't been so revolutionary on story side. But well, I often first start designing tiles and levels, try to get some common theme, and when I have that, I start to thinking about story. Probably I should first make story, then do the sprites, then tiles and finally levels. That way I might someday get something done.. sigh We want Keen Chronicles!
XkyRauh2001 Vorticon Elite Posts: 934 (8/1/04 7:27 pm) Reply	re: making a mod Oh, man, if you guys only knew how disorganized I am when it comes to modmaking... it really is sheer luck that anything makes sense by the time I'm done with it. Take XkyKeen1 for example. I made the whole mod in about 20 days, and the process went something like this: Re-design Keen sprite, get him looking good. Re-design Yorp sprite, Butler-bot, Tank-bot, get them looking okay. Look at level tiles, put together LEVEL02.ck1, get stuck for a day or two. Play Keen5, notice that Sparkies are an awful lot like Gargs, make some knock-off Garg replacements. Need reason for there to BE Sparkies in my mod. Replace Vorticon with Mortimer-bot. Toss together a few tiles to indicate a ship-like environment. Get a vision of Keen jumping over a huge pit of battery acid, put that level together (the XkyKeen1 level that starts by jumping up a column of the clear-wrap shooters)... Become inspired by this new level and put together a few other levels. Finally put some time into tweaking the graphics. Come up with a story on-the-fly as Yorp-statues are put in place. Finish every level except the one the player starts on... put B-w-B in, be very proud of how that first shot looks. Almost ready to release mod? Nope--gotta do story now. Wait for 3 days, thinking about how to make things work... patch lots of text, use unused tiles to toss together a title screen, play-test 7 or 8 dozen times, let it sit for a full day before coming back for the final play test... tweak a few things, let it sit for a day... put those tweaks back the way they were and release the mod. :-P And that was just the one-month schedule that XkyKeen1 had. Imagine how much crap happened during my full year of XkyKeen2! For the most part, all of my modding takes place based on the modding I've already done. Which means my work schedule accelerates as the release date gets closer and closer. I'll start by doing something really innane--like a single enemy, or a group of nine tiles--and let that sit for a few days while I admire it... but slowly, as I do more and more, I get these ideas for how the whole thing could work with a story. It means sometimes I hafta tweak stuff after the fact, but honestly, that's how I mod. A piece at a time. --Xky
Djaser Grunt Posts: 3073 (8/2/04 6:51 am) Reply	Re: re: making a mod For all my unfinished mods and fangames: I just come up with a story, draw some enemy sketches. Draw them in paint. Get big problems with modkeen. Stop project. For my photoshop pictures I also use sketches. ----------------- Back to spring 2002 when the crusade started...
KeenRush Vorticon Elite Posts: 6718 (8/2/04 8:43 am) Reply	Re: re: making a mod I see. Only if it'd be possible to get the sprites done easily.... We want Keen Chronicles!
CommanderSpleen Vorticon Elite Posts: 548 (8/2/04 9:52 am) Reply	Modme! [edit: Ack! I've gotta stop misquoting... BBz => SB2] SB2 Actually a dream inspired Keen in the Bronze age... Heh, a dream inspired me to start what is now JimSoft, back in 2001... it was about a really weird little game involving creatures shaped similar to the dome buildings in Keen1, with a single eyeball in the middle of their forehead, scampering back and forth grabbing trees from a nearby forest (which flashed white as would a sprite when hit by a bullet in an arcade game) and heading back to some sort of town hall building nearby. Then a couple of slightly larger creatures with round, pac-man type heads (but with sharp teeth, as opposed to old-man gums) ran in from the top-left of my playfield and started eating my guys! That's where the dream ended. I hadn't thought a whole lot about game design for a few years up until then, but the next day it was pretty much all I could think about. As soon as I got back to civilisation (I was headed toward Port Macquarie, just below the Queensland border) I gathered a couple of friends with the intent of creating a game development team. And from there it all took off as I rediscovered friends from my previous secondary college, and was introduced to more and more lunatics. Although we're much less active at the moment, everyone's still out there waiting for the massive projects we had in mind to be resurrected. Anyway, back to the topic at hand... I have a very haphazard approach to most of my projects. Sometimes I'll be working non-stop with all sorts of ideas burning in my head, determined to get as much done as I can, other times I feel nauseous even thinking about it. At this point in time, I'm in the former state. Access to a projector, effectively offering a 3m wide screen about a metre or two in front of me, tends to have that effect. After a few failed attempts at starting a mod around the time I first found the PCKB, I started drawing a few pages of tile and sprite ideas. [people started entering room... no longer using projector ] Having everything down on paper made drawing up all the tiles in Paint a breeze. The sprites tripped me up a bit, but some raw hard work got me through them. The levels were just pure fun to put together, though I often became annoyed at myself for the lack of variety, excessive points, insanely hard/easy traps--levels are one of the main culprits for my long periods non-modding. I spent at least a month straight at the computer, from when I woke up around 1pm-3pm, until I went to sleep at 3am-5am, puntuated by maybe two hours, at most, outside the house during weekdays/Sunday, and maybe 5 hours on Saturday. Completely tripped out, 'twas. Then the rest of my family returned to inhabiting the house. The last quarter of 2003 was one crazy blur for me. The basic idea for the mod was spawned by a Dorito I came across at a party, which inspired the basic pointy, 'curvedly-triangular' appearance of the Garthurian monks, though there were many other influences from then on, most notably themes involving triangles, eyeballs, etc. It all fell into place as I went along. I just keep drawing the ideas that come into mind, adding them to my mod's graphics set, then messing around with them a bit. Every time I think I'm close to consolidating the whole thing, a trove of new ideas will surface that get me working in a new and unexpected direction once again. Heh... as for my fangame... I'll tell you all about it when it's done. I've said some of this stuff a few times in various topics over the year-and-then-some, but there you are--some scattered thoughts about my mod and some other stuff. Or something. >Commander Spleen � Cave assectatorem Ductoris Alacris � "Well, at least I can spel worth a damn." - http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BillZimmerly JimSoft Lair http://jimsoftlair.tripod.com/ Edited by: CommanderSpleen at: 8/2/04 10:44 am
BBalazs Vorticon Elite Posts: 597 (8/2/04 10:00 am) Reply	Re: Modme! Why did you quote me, CS? ------------------------------------------------------ Keep in mind, I'm not an artist.
Yowza Vorticon Elite Posts: 345 (8/2/04 10:29 am) Reply	Re: Modme!
LevelLord00 Vorticon Elite Posts: 1346 (8/2/04 10:34 am) Reply	Re: Modyou! I sit down, look at everone elses work and think 'what can I rip?' Then I rip it and just alter stuff until it feels alright. I tend to mod in feverent bursts, covering entire levels in half an hour. If no one gets whats going on- too bad! UR A Frt Ltl Mrt Dsinhrt! "No one should be here" -Level Lord
Djaser Grunt Posts: 3075 (8/2/04 10:47 am) Reply	Re: Modyou! *Quote:* I see. Only if it'd be possible to get the sprites done easily.... The screens of your second mod looked promising in everyones opinion. I think the problem is more in your head than in the spritis. ----------------- Back to spring 2002 when the crusade started...
KeenRush Vorticon Elite Posts: 6723 (8/2/04 2:01 pm) Reply	Re: Modyou! Mmmh. But it'll take me a year to make sprites, I can't understand how I hate it so much. It's just pure anger when I'm trying to draw vorticon grunt replacement. I'll start to rip sprites for now on. We want Keen Chronicles!
BBalazs Vorticon Elite Posts: 601 (8/2/04 5:03 pm) Reply	Re: Modyou! Watch out before you transform into LL! ------------------------------------------------------ Keep in mind, I'm not an artist.
LevelLord00 Vorticon Elite Posts: 1360 (8/3/04 11:58 am) Reply	Re: Modyou! Go on... rip his avatar... you know you want to. If no one gets whats going on- too bad! UR A Frt Ltl Mrt Dsinhrt! "No one should be here" -Level Lord
BBalazs Vorticon Elite Posts: 605 (8/3/04 4:19 pm) Reply	Re: Modyou! Hehe, what comes next? KeenRush, I'm your sister! or what? ------------------------------------------------------ Keep in mind, I'm not an artist.