Level Tileset Themes: Required Tiles

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CommanderSpleen
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Level Tileset Themes: Required Tiles

Post by CommanderSpleen »

It's just about time to start manufacturing level tilesets. (Using the multiple tileset patch, we can use a separate tileset for each level.) But first, we must define exactly what kind of tiles are needed.

Below is the latest list of descriptions as composed by Deltamatic. From these, we must decide what tiles fit into each theme. Platforms, collectables, backgrounds, and hazards are the primary details.

Some of these will be used across multiple tilesets. I'll have to figure out a way to manage those without making things overly complicated, but lat's just see where this approach takes us first.

This thread will not contain the graphics, nor will it be used for submissions. It will serve as a reference.

1. Crashed BwB - clearing edged by trees, flaming rocket debris scattered around. It's fall and at sunset, so the tree leaves are rather red.
2. Forest - Fall sunset forest.
3. Algal pool - Think like this, but bigger.
4. Canyon - a big, brown canyon. Background is like this.
5. Geyser - Same background as canyon, but with big geysers.
6. Tree city - Sunset fall forest again, but with a really big tree filled with treehouses.
7. Slug town 1 - pleasant little village, cobblestone, cottages, etc.
8. Estuary ford - rivulets flowing to the sea. Stones poke up through the water.
9. Swamp 1 - an old, green mucky swamp.
10. Swamp 2 - more of the same, but different somehow.
11. Cemetery - lots of gravestones on a hill. Pointy iron fence surrounds it.
12. Slug town 2 - pleasant village's marketplace.
13. Waterfall - the bottom of a gigantic waterfall. Background is gray stone.
14. Lick city - brooding structures of metal and rock packed together with narrow streets winding through. Against same gray stone as waterfall, but more flat.
15. Lick moat and gatehouse - front part of a castle's moat with the drawbridge drawn halfway up (Keen pogos onto its edge to get inside) and a square tower with arrow slits in it above the drawbridge. Same rock and metal as last time. Same background as last time.
16. Lick castle - Same building materials, same background, but it's a big castle. Towers, turrets, parapets, Lick banners fluttering.
17. Slug bridge - a big bridge the pleasant village built across a river. Somewhat rickety, with lots of rotting planks and the occasional hole.
18. Archaeological site 1 - excavations, archaeologists' camp.
19. Archaeological site 2 - ruins. Think Egypt--obelisks, pyramids, an alien sphinx.
20. Archaeological site 3 - more ruinous ruins, with more things crumbling and toppled. Statues, bas-reliefs, pillars.
21. Archaeological site 4 - the Egyptian ruins fade away, revealing the more Mayan/alien/geometric things they were built on top of, true remnants of Gnosticene Ancient civilization.
22. Meadows - very lush, green, flowery place.
23. Stream - small stream running right to left. Grass background.
24. Lake - big blue lake, island in the middle, another stream running into it on right and out of it on the left. Grass background.
25. Rainbow - a rainbow up in the sky, against the cliff background the waterfall was against. Bottom-left part sprouts from the waterfall, arcing up to the top-right part.
26. Beach - sandy seaside place.
27. Misty woods - tall, coniferous trees, as opposed to the deciduous trees in the fall sunset forest.
28. Foothills - patches of grass on pink hills.
29. Mine shaft - old wooden structure built above a hole that plunges underground.
30. Secret area 1 - a tropical island resort.
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Deltamatic
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Post by Deltamatic »

Note that the descriptions were for world map level tiles, not the levels themselves. So the "backgrounds" described would be ground/platforms, as opposed to in-level backgrounds.
lemm
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Tileset Editor and How to use

Post by lemm »

TLS editor now in dropbox; it is just a modified adurdin's TileInfo. Make sure you are using the testmod in the dropbox.

To use the tls editor, you first click load to load your 16-colour 1TIL0000.bmp into the LEFT window. The load graphics button is then disabled.

Now you can either make a NEW or OPEN an existing .tls. Any .tls you open must have been made by the editor. The "in" frame is disabled.

You should see two big windows with tiles. On the left, you have the master bitmap. This is what is what is saved in the .tls file. On the right, you are looking at the current graphic for frame X of tile Y. You can change frames by pressing alt+1 thru 8.

If you click the right window, it moves the RED cursor. This does NOT change anything in the .tls. If you click the LEFT window, it moves the GREEN cursor. This changes the graphic for Frame X of tile Y. (Remember, all tiles are animated; some of them just have the same graphic for all frames!).

To create animations, select a tile with the red cursor. Then press Alt+1, and select a graphic with the green cursor. Press Alt+2, select graphic with the green cursor, and so forth, until you have done this for all frames. It's a little more tedious than normal, but you can create custom patterns. Each frame is previewed in the mini windows, and you can even preview animation by pressing Alt+1, 2, 3 ,4, 1 ,2, 3, 4... :)

Blocking: Click a tile with the red cursor. Now, look at the enlarged view. Whereas the original tileinfo only had a dropdown menu for the top face, and buttons for the left, right and bottom, we now have dropdown buttons for each face. (Types 2 and 3 don't do anything yet for the bottom and side faces, but we could make bottom type 2 a hand-hang-able tile, for example).

Slopes: If you make a face blocking, you can also make it a slope. To make a TOP SLOPED tile, ONLY CLICK the "S" button on the TOP FACE. To make a BOTTOM sloped tile, click the "S" button on the BOTTOM and LEFT or RIGHT. After you click an S button, a line will appear across the magnified tile. You can click the left or right side of the tile to change the slope angle. Note that the slope angle can only be 1:1, 1:2, or 1:4. When you are happy with your slope, press the SET SLOPE button. If all is well, then the line will turn red, indicating that the slope has been set. Otherwise, a message will pop up telling you to redo the slope. Make sure you press SET SLOPE, or else no changes to slope are made!

Type: Similar to olde tileinfo, just select from the general behaviour. For the community mod, we can add new tile types in.

Finally, when you are done with your tileset, make sure you press SAVE and save the .tls to the keen directory. (ckcm testmod: save as tileset1.tls). Now, open TILEHEAD.CK1 in the testmod directory using a hex editor. You can see that it has .tls filenames. The filename at $10 is the .tls loaded for level 1, the filename at $20 is the .tls loaded for level 2, etc etc. all the way up to level 90.

Issues:
If you make a new tileset and then run the test mod, the bitmaps might be garbled in game. This will be rectified when keengraph allows you to import 910 or more tiles (or maybe it already can, idunno).
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Deltamatic
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Post by Deltamatic »

This isn't complete, but it's got a lot of stuff and I'm tired. Tell me if you want any other areas to have similar stuff typed up for them.

Sunset Forest
There's a sunset going on. Sun is yellow and big. Clouds are like these clouds, but pink. Sky is orange. There are trees all around. There are trees as tall as the palm trees in Keen 4 at the lower parts of the background. There are also trees made out of tiles that Keen can climb on. The trees are deciduous, so they have lots of branches and are about as wide as they are tall. They have red, orange, and yellow leaves, mostly red. The ground is covered with fallen leaves.
Crashed Bean-with-Bacon Megarocket (in Sunset Forest)
The megarocket's parts are scattered across the clearing. The hull sections are on fire. The burning animations stretch across several tiles. The nose section isn't there, it's still in the time field miles away. The shattered windshield, torn seat, smashed joystick, cracked battery, broken fuel bottle, exploded vacuum cleaner, and burning hull are all there. (Maybe Keen has to climb trees over them to avoid the fires.)
Tree City (in Sunset Forest)
Imagine lots of variations on this, with bridges or ziplines between them:
Image
Badlands
I'm not even sure if this will be in the game, but I'll type stuff for it anyway. The sun isn't in the background. The sky is blue, and partly covered with clouds, which are white and blue and puffy like this. There aren't any trees or grass, but there are plenty of natural arches, like this. The ground (not the rock formations, just the ground) looks like this:
Image
Canyon (in the Badlands)
The level starts on one edge of the canyon. As you go forward the level drops down to the bottom of the canyon before going back up until you're at the other edge of the canyon and the end of the level. There could be lots of rock pillars in it, like this:
Image
Geyser (in the Badlands)
There are lots of geysers in this level, of different sizes and at different angles. Here's an example of a geyser as it's firing:
Image
The level would be a puzzle where Keen tries to time himself so that he doesn't get hit by a geyser.
Algal pool (in the Badlands)
Looks like this, but a lot bigger. Keen goes from one side to the other. Mushroom rock formations like this one are what he hops on. Some of them are almost underwater, so they're wet and slippery.
Slug Village
Quaint Elizabethan architecture, like so:
Image
The sun is there with a cloudless bright blue sky. The streets are cobblestone, like this:
Image
But instead of being shiny dark gray, they're the color of the wall of the building with the orange domes in the picture above this picture. Statues, fountains, and gardens are scattered throughout. Clotheslines with slug clothing hanging out to dry are stretched between windows. There's a marketplace with a bakery, fresh fruit sold in stalls, a juggler. (Hmm, how would you animate a juggling slug?) The biggest building is kind of a cross between a town hall and a castle, with wide stone steps leading up to it, a clock tower, a throne room, and the type of top of wall that this picture has:
Image
I don't know how many levels the slug village will be made of, so I'll just stop there.
Swamp
Lots of lily pads. The water is green. Next to the trees are "knees" like those in the foreground of this picture:
Image
Oh yeah. And the trees themselves look like this:
Image
Two or three moons are in the sky. Lots of different-colored stars, cloudless night. Because Gnosticus IV is in the same galaxy as earth, we can't have any big galaxies in the sky, though.
Cemetery (in the swamp)
A fence surrounds it.
Image
There's a gate at the front.
Image
And of course, lots of tombstones. But I'm sure you don't need photos to draw them. On the island in the swamp that the cemetery is on, there's dead, scraggly grass.
Lick Plateau
Another night sky, like this one. Buildings are blocky, oppressive. Made of rocks and barbed wire. The streets are littered with garbage and have lots of puddles and potholes in them. The castle has lots of spiky towers and searchlights. Trees are gnarly and stunted, like this one. Rusted metal poles dot the cityscape. Dripping pipes stick out of a few buildings. There's a forge where all that metal is processed, a clanging, smoke-belching thing, of course. The castle has tapestries showing when times were better for the Licks.
Archaeological Site
To avoid looking like Ceilick's Keen 8, the background sand isn't flat but in big dunes.
Image
The sun is in the sky, with a few long thin clouds near it.
Excavation (in archaeological site)
When archaeologists excavate things, they do it carefully with lots of flags and markers and stuff. It ends up looking like this. There are nearby tents and remains of a fire where the archaeologists used to live.
Monuments (in archaeological site)
Obelisks.
Image
Pyramids. And a sphinx
Image
but with changes that make it look alien.
Ruins (in archaeological site)
Statues of Treasure Eaters. Bas-reliefs:
Image
Pillars. All of them are heavily damaged and crumbling or toppled.
Gnosticene Ancient city (in archaeological site)
Imagine a Mayan pyramid built as a cube. Combine that with a maze made out of Nazca lines. Embed crystal monoliths.
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CommanderSpleen
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Post by CommanderSpleen »

Good stuff! If we can get some imagery like that into the game, it will be most spectacular.

Also, we should factor in some floating land wherever the lifewater exists. Obvious examples are Avatar and Tyrian. Of course, there'll be 'hovering' platforms throughout the game, so it needs to be made more obvious that the entire level is actually floating far above the mainland.
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Deltamatic
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Post by Deltamatic »

To make it obvious the flying land is flying:

- Show the bottom of the land, complete with dangling roots.
- Have plenty of clouds below it.
- If it's okay to have *almost* the entire level in the air then start out on the ground and have Keen climb all the way up to the flying land.
- Lots of bird sprites, maybe hot air balloon or dirigible sprites as well.
- Up in the atmosphere there could be strong winds that blow Keen around.
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Post by CommanderSpleen »

Would it be too abstract if we allowed the player to stand on clouds as in Keen 3?
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Post by lemm »

no it wouldn't

also nice pictures =)
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