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| New Website! | September 20, 2004 |
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The site for the Keen Project has now been officially moved to Go there for details. I'll keep this site around for other side projects and to help everyone update their bookmarks. There will be no further updates here regarding the Commander Keen game project. |
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| A New Level | August 25, 2004 |
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A new tech demo is up, it contains a highly simplified version of a familiar villiage.
Plus there is a new actor to interact with. Other than the graphics, this one is easily recognized. Some of the progress details have been updated as well, some of the recent developments are now reflected in the progress indicators. |
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| Downloads | August 18, 2004 |
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There is a brand new tech demo available on the project page. It's pretty cool, check it out! An updated beta sprite editor is available as well. This includes both a new feature and a small change in file format. |
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| Newness Abounds | August 16, 2004 |
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A beta version of the sprite editor is now available! Pick it up here. It is really intended to be a simple tool to make sprite building faster, so it's not quite user friendly. If you are interested in making it better, modify the source and let me know! The graphics system has been updated a lot. The actors now use a sprite file generated by the sprite editor to get their graphics. Also there is now a bitmap file manager. This takes care of loading a bitmap file once and then re-using the same file from memory when other objects want to copy part of that bitmap. This will improve memory usage and load time. Just last night I finished modifying the player walking code so the player doesn't seem to be falling a lot. (In the tech demos, this caused the animation to look funky because it was constantly switch to the "falling" frame.) This also fixed the problem where the player could get "stuck" trying to go up a hill. Finally I decided to post a few screenshots taken from the tech demo. Check out the project page for details! |
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| Still Working | July 16, 2004 |
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It's been over half a year now and you probably thought the project was dead. Stop worrying, it's still going. Unfortunately not very much progress has been made as far as the game itself is concerned, mostly due to the fact that between the last update and the middle of May, I was busy finishing my final semester at college. Some more time was spent working on the architectural design of the system. But here's the good news: I'm nearly finished with a working sprite editor! It's a nice windows application which allows you to select bitmaps and then specify frames within the bitmaps. I want to build an animated preview feature so you can see what your sprites will look like in the game right there in the editor, and want to put a little more thought into the file format before I release the program here. Also when I was getting ready to update this, I noticed that the previous update said it was from January 10, 2003, instead of 2004. Oops! |
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| More Progress | January 10, 2004 |
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Over the past month I've spent a lot of time putting the system architecture down on paper. This means documenting all the different modules and interactions that are in my head. The result is that I can proceed with better focus and more quickly discover architectural problems and fix them before writing a bunch of code. Having this documentation will be incredibly helpful for anyone interested in working with the source code. Therefore I have begun transcribing it in digital content. Once it is finished there will be a whole new section to this website. Check out the new tech demo on the project page, I think you'll like it! While getting the project to this point, I discovered a HUGE memory leak that has existed in the system since the first tech demo. Much of the code to clean up the memory used by the graphics has been in the engine since the beginning, but I only recently noticed that I simply wasn't using it. When the game ends, the game simply left all of its graphics data in memory. Fortunately newer versions of Windows and DirectX probably clean this up for me. But that is bad, BAD programming! Now I'm planning to re-work the collision detection code. I want to use a much different set of methods that will result in much more accurate and precise behavior. |
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| Happy Thanksgiving! | November 27, 2003 |
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Besides the nice holiday wishes, there's a quick update. The big overhaul to the new architecture is essentially complete. Meaning I can get right back into adding features after finals. Infinite loops ... As I was trying to get the system to work, it kept stalling on me. I had one of those "what was I thinking?!" moments, as I discovered that the real basic loop that makes sure something doesn't just fall through the floor was very susceptible to never exiting. Oops! So I rewrote some of the collision checking code, it's much cleaner. This will be helpful once the source code is released. The real reason for this posting is something I forgot to mention a couple days ago. I have half of the graphics done for one of the bad guys! |
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| Held Up | November 25, 2003 |
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I should probably try to keep some sort of a development journal up here to supplement the occasional update to the project page. It may seem that this project has become yet another good idea without that has just been forgotten. But never fear! I am merely forced to set the project aside during school. Luckily, this is my senior year. On one hand, that may mean a busier life after school, but it also means that my free weeknights will no longer be filled with studying. In other words, hopefully beginning next summer, I will be able to concentrate "full-time" on Keen. However, that isn't an update. The following is. Since the time of the last tech demo update (July), I have made substantial changes to the code. I'm in the process, near the end in fact, of using an entirely new architecture. The engine itself hasn't changed at all, what I'm doing is changing what you could call the "Direct-X wrapper". This means changing all the code that does the initial setup and initialization. From a player's perspective, there is no difference. But this architecture has sound and input systems implemented, so once I'm done we can begin doing the input code and adding sound effects. Additionally, the new architecture is more stable, it is much easier to create a custom error report if something crashes. Another small development has been the early designs for a new collision detection system. Not a new technology, but new to the Keen project. A rather huge development is the fact that I've come up with almost all of the story, and even have a few ideas for levels sketched out! And they will be surprises, so I can't tell you anything other than a level from Goodbye Galaxy will be in the game and the story takes place shortly after Aliens Ate my Babysitter. Christmas break is coming up, hopefully I'll get some work done then! Finally, we're having trouble coming up with a title. Current ideas include: "Unseen Danger", "The Dark Caper" and "Mortimer's Quagmire" - Zach |
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| The beginning | July 12, 2002 |
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Just started this site today. A bit of an introduction is in order. KeenKoncepts is a "temporary" name for a computer game company. Due to current lack of a better name, Keen Koncepts was adopted because the user name happened to be available on Yahoo, and it reflected our first major game project. Our first game project is the yet to be named, Commander Keen sequel. (The Universe is Toast could get us into a bit of trouble.) |
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Copyright 2004 Keen Koncepts