Donkey Kong Country 2 will be 20 years old this November!
Yes, it's that time again! Actually, I'm a bit late in starting the DKC2 mapping countdown compared with last year's 101-day extravaganza, but that just means that each update will be more significant this time around. Yep, no more one-bonus-area-per-day-for-most-of-a-week tedium — I'm looking at
you,
Orang-utan Gang and
Oil Drum Alley...
So how will it go this time? Well, rather than a level's bonus areas being added one at a time, they will all be added together the day after the level itself is updated — now
that's value! Bosses will be treated with a bit more significance this time, as not only are their environments, behaviours and designs more complex and diverse, but beating bosses actually adds to your game completion percentage in Diddy's Kong Quest — 2% for each regular boss, and a whopping 5% for each K. Rool battle! That's interesting trivia, but I'm sure you can appreciate that it'd make for a rather tedious and anticlimactic countdown if we kept the one-percent-per-day thing going with an imbalance like that.
Anyway, do you want to read my ramblings, or would you rather see some sweet animated maps?
Here's a fairly-advanced-but-still-work-in-progress Pirate Panic map to get things underway!
New and improved Pirate Panic map — with all special rooms and bonus areas!
![Pirate-Panic-map-preview.jpg](./download/file.php?id=3503&sid=8dcb02c78790cbe4354d9bf6257dfc7a)
- Pirate-Panic-map-preview.jpg (88.93 KiB) Viewed 195158 times
New features include:
- Bananas are animated — thanks, Kingizor!
- Objects now have their correct animation speeds — if your computer and browser are up to the task!
- K. Rool's Kabin has its own map, and is animated as it appears in-game — you can even read his mocking message and discover his valuable hidden treasure!
- Basic object info is available on hover — this will be improved soon! (or so I keep saying...)
- Plus of course the warp room and bonus areas are available for your viewing pleasure, too.
![Very Happy smiley :D](./images/smilies/icon_e_biggrin.gif)
There are a few improvements I'll make when I get a chance, but I didn't want to delay the countdown any longer! Hopefully the current presentation is agreeable enough for the time being, and I can chip away at the to-do list as we push ahead with the countdown. Keep in mind that feedback is welcome and encouraged, so feel free to share any thoughts you may have about these maps, and any good ideas may be implemented if they can be done.
Again I'd like to say a big thankyou to Kingizor for performing many acts of hacking wizardry to provide me with object position data, banana animations/positions, graphics extractions, etc, as well as ongoing feedback and suggestions — and to Simion32 for the DKC2 terrain extractions he facilitated those years ago. The developers of
ZSNES,
Snes9x and
vSNES also deserve shout-outs for providing many of the extraction/reference tools that made these maps possible.
![Nice work! :nicework:](./images/smilies/dontbesilly.gif)
Oh, I almost forgot to mention that the
Crocodile Isle overworld map and
Gangplank Galleon world map are available to assist with navigation, too! Thanks are again due to Kingizor for
the nifty script (
BBCode implementation announced here) that makes the world/level names a cinch to render. Crocodile Isle could certainly use some work, so I'll be putting plenty of energy into it over the next few days, but Gangplank Galleon is pretty much in order — give or take the pointer arrows, which I'll add soon.
![Happy smiley :)](./images/smilies/icon_e_smile.gif)
Okay, that's enough from me... I've got dozens of things to work on, and
you're only reading this because you're bored! ![Cranky :rant:](./images/smilies/crankycomplain.gif)