Kickstart a Commander Keen successor, and the tools to build your own

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Tom Hall's "Worlds of Wander" game creation tool looks Keen, literally. It looks like the classic side-scroller Commander Keen, which Hall designed back in 1990. Hall has launched a Kickstarter for the Worlds of Wander tool, through which he promises to deliver not only a method to create and share your own games, but a full sample game to play and experiment with.

That game may be enough to secure pledges on its own. Secret Spaceship Club is billed as "the spiritual successor to Commander Keen." It stars two kids who discover a world of "secret space agents who disguise their spaceships as common objects," and set off to help them defeat the Bumbledybots.

The editor allows users to create content in either a streamlined "Simple Mode" ("Smart-draw with ground tiles, ladders, bridges, switches, and more (it nicens the edges for you), then populate your world with NPCs and enemies and objects and dangers, then hook them all up with an easy-to-use Place 'n' Fiddle interface!") or a more robust Advanced Mode, and make levels to play on iOS, PC, Mac, and Ubuntu.

It will allow all that, if the $400,000 Kickstarter goal is raised. The drive just launched, with just $750 as of writing. "This isn't just a spiritual successor to Keen," Hall notes. "It's an editor and game content-sharing community – so that means servers, community support, lots of art and design and programming!"