Fortress of Forgotten Souls (featuring Dungeon development diary entry 11)

Dungeon is finished.

Let's use that Header 2 font for once :) Yes, this is reality. The 1010 tiles tileset is now finished, and it will not see any major changes after this. Quite an intensive time of wrestling with Paint Shop Pro and other devices have led to this point. The first concept drawing done under codename Castle of Cadavers was made in December 2006. That was originally intended to be a picture of an actual coming tileset, as usual when I am working with something, the final result is something else. A long time of nothing happening ensued the conception, but Dungeon finally got into the development phase in August 2007. The base of everything was done during this time and everything else (aka meat on the bones) was done in October 2007 to January 2008. I will get to this as the diary progresses further. At this point I can say, that the Dungeon development diary has a total of 41 entries with the last one being a gigantic entry looking into the year 2007 and making of Dungeon. The diary is accompanied with 37 screenshots, and they will be seen here later, of course.

Now it really is not long time to the release in Jazz2Online. Watch that space :) And oh yes, let me tell you the real name of my 14th tileset. That's The Fortress of Forgotten Souls and the abbreviation being simply "Fortress". See you soon at J2O!

11. 17th October 2007

A long pause! My new school (that actually started only a day after the entry before this) dragged me to the real life for this two months recess. Many, many nice events kept me away from development of Dungeon, but in the end I think I have now refueled my inspiration to craft the tileset further.

I don't have that big updates today. The biggest is that one of the four differently decayed brick sets (the one that was intact) was deleted. This way I save a lot of space and the image of a decaying castle is seen clearer. The walls have now cracks. It is way better this way and I can't believe I didn't come up with this before.

The next step in the process is creating cracks for the walking tiles and making of some kind of pillars. Now Dungeon looks a lot like the original Prince of Persia :D Maybe later this will start to look something I made, not only copied.

The curtain unveils...

There has been some nice development in The Castle of Cadavers in the recent days.

This led to the decision to show everybody who's interested how the new tileset looks right now. Remember, work in progress! :)




This screenshot here features the dungeon part of the tileset. It is basically a dark, old and repelling place with spider webs and in the future, more prison stuff to literally make it a dungeon. The most recent additions to the tileset are the pillars and the spider webs. Both will change before the final release, but this screen shows their inputs for the tileset pretty good. This picture also features two kinds of walls and floors for flexibility, and the wall texture with three different variations of cracked bricks. The three versions don't differ dramatically but believe me, only one variation would have looked dull. The three brick textures are, however, only a beginning. Expect to see much more stuff inside the ground/wall in the final release of Castle Of Cadavers! (no buried shovels, though)

So, what next? More dungeon stuff! There are essential tiles to be done, as the dungeon part is the base of this tileset. Essential tiles are not so fun to draw, as variations of everything are always needed and therefore much, much repetition.

The development of Castle of Cadavers seems now to be back on its tracks, and I see no obstacles ahead. But one! I don't have not found any good music tracks that could fit in the atmosphere of the tileset. So, I challenge you, dear readers, to tell me what would you put in the background of that screenshot above. It can be dark, melancholic, angry, eerie or pretty much anything you'd hear when playing a centuries old, abandoned castle level. With rain outside! Write your suggestions in the comments or e-mail me. If I pick your choice for the final release, you get mentioned in the credits! Think about that :)

P.S. The current state of Castle of Cadavers reminds me strongly of the original Prince of Persia.

Tileset 3: Rocks

Hello Jazz Jackrabbit population!

It's been a little while since the last post. I am here again, however, to explain some things about Rocks. My tileset number three that, to my opinion, never brought up any major feelings. Rocks is as neutral as it is grey. I am not bashing my old production, though. After all these years (7,2 or something) Rocks is very usable tileset to build a level where it is moderately hard to make it look like (s)crap and have lots of masking problems. And the secret is... you have no other choice! The first Rocks tileset has 270 tiles, and even the final version (packaged with Energized Action) is 280 tiles in size. You don't have many tiles to choose from! I think this could be genious, actually. To everybody's relief/worst fear, this geniousness is far gone, because I won't be doing tilesets of this size ever again. Since Forest I have had too much to say to put it in 300 tiles.

What about history of Rocks? The reasons Rocks exists are long gone, but I remember a glimpse about drawing it. As you may see the simple base of the tileset could be drawn in maybe minutes, and the whole tileset dAone in some weeks. Rocks is the last Universe Jazz release I made before moving on to a certain website formerly known as jazz2.nagcentral.com. More about that later in the Glacier blog entry. The first Rocks, finished on 14th June 2000, was most probably the fastest tileset to draw. Considering that Rocks has no background stuff for layers 5-7 and the amount of eyecandy tiles can be counted with one hand fingers, it is not hard to believe.

There are some interesting things about Rocks anyway. Inspired by the old Aztec tileset, I put in the same file day and night versions of the tileset. Back in those days I somehow realized that it was possible to have two different warp backgrounds in one tileset, and behold, two tilesets in one. I have not heard about attempt like Aztec's and Rocks' before and ever since. Maybe because of the drawback. The second warp background suffers about "the infinity problem", in which the fog plane disappears and reveals that the sky effect continues pretty far away. Fortunately this applies only to 8 bit color modes. Nowadays the infinity problem causes almost no damage to anyone, since you would have to have a computer running at 133 MHz (and a very, very sucky video card), to have to turn on the 8 bit color mode. Rocks introduced the two parts of the same tileset in two example levels which were actually different this time. I recently tested the example levels to notice pretty amateur level design and an annoying loose bridge fetish.

Rocks hasn't changed much in its appearance since the tileset conception. Sure, the warp backgrounds had their face lift in 2001, I believe, but most of the changes are invisible. Rocks' masking was very flawed, and there was a possibility to get stuck in every tile corner there is. I don't remember this happening to me, but I was convinced to change the masking anyway. In addition, V- and H-poles were fixed. I find it very hard to believe that I had broken poles in my tileset for three years! Yeesh. Nobody mentioned about it, though :) In these two screenshots you see the first Rocks release (up) and the final release from 2003 (down).

The official "fact you most probably don't know" about Rocks is that once, in 2001, there was a Rocks version called "Rocks SE", SE standing for Second Edition (way to go, Win98SE!). For an unknown reason, there was never any background tiles for Rocks. This didn't bother me in the beginning, but along with the later tileset Wasteland, Jazz2 players didn't understand why these tilesets didn't have background layer stuff. In response, I created Rocks SE. It is basically the first Rocks release with ugly background hills. I can't remember was this version ever released, but if it has, it was done quietly resulting in that small amount of people ever learned about the Second Edition version. Rocks SE didn't stand up too long, and I quickly left it in the back of the hard disk. I show it to you this day, but don't think it's anything extraordinary. Because it is not.

Now, let me tell something about Rocks music. As in the earlier tileset releases, Rocks didn't have "Mysterius Times" theme from the beginning. There was "Try 17" By Queek. I liked that track at that time, but with Blade's Battle Pack the theme changed to the DreaMSectioN track, that indeed is better than Try 17. Yep, that's all there is to say about this topic.

Before I end, I will say some words about the progressing Castle Of Cadavers. There has been a month long hiatus in its creation. This doesn't mean anything, the developing will continue soon enough. The graveyard background has come obsolete, however. I like this primary idea, but somehow it doesn't look cool enough. I think I must do some more essential tiles before starting to work with the background stuff.

Tileset 2: Beton

Hi!

I have real news this time, Castle of Cadavers has really been in works for a week now. It looks promising! I had done many tests with various bricks for basic ground tiles, including the ones you saw a couple of blog entries before, but I came to a solution to abandon them all. Therefore the preview tiles are not going to be in the final tileset.

What has been done so far? Surprisingly, there is already 90 tiles ready for use. With those it is possible to build pretty crude castle environment, because there is basically no eye candy present, not just yet. I may show you some in-development screenshots about this stage later. Much progress must be made before the first screenshots will be released. Additionally, today I drew a landscape for a background layer. I will not go through the content not just now, as it is still a bit unfinished. I feel it is important that it is present in my tileset level tests even though it may be like 75% ready. All the black and grey is enough to make anyone annoyed! I have been keeping up a journal about the tileset progress. This prevents from forgetting stuff. For example, next I will be complaining for 1000 words about how I have forgotten everything about Beton creation progress.

Okay, Beton it is. My second official tileset, featuring a brownish ground where to walk, some concrete-like blobs for layer 4 background, and in the background layers some enormous steel elements (I wonder did anyone understand this during these years :) and mountains. I bet this tileset was far less popular compared to Aztec, as this is actually pretty little tileset with little possibilities to do exciting stuff to play. Compared to Aztec's several years of development, the first version of Beton was ready for release in one month. It is more simple than Aztec, and looking this Beton version 2 screenshot here tells everybody that the example level was build in approximately four minutes.

I have never given Beton so much attention, but I will try to concentrate to it now. It deserves it, after all. There are some things that are interesting to it. Some people may have noticed the slight resemblance between Beton and master Mez's tileset Mez03. It is not your mind playing. I tried to duplicate some parts of that tileset to Beton. Mostly the "copying" is visible in Beton ground tiles and the stuff you can put inside it. I knew it then like I know it now, the duplication is far inferior from the original. This didn't stop me much, I just drew stuff and soon after I had the finished tileset at my disposal. The finished tileset did not look so much like Mez's, so I was even happier (about not getting sued, heh). Probably inspired by Mez, there is also a night version of Beton. It looks actually better than the day counterpart. The kind Alienator of Universe Jazz gave Beton three stars, the best. Beton was first seen there around the beginning of March, 2000.

The current Beton version is, like the up-to-date Aztec, heavily modified from the original. During the years it gained 50 more tiles that are positioned in the bottom of the tileset. You could live without these late additions, but after all, they are essential tiles and should have been there in the first release. In addition, many cosmetic changes were made. The warp background, the background layer stuff and metal parts of the sucker tubes got more colours, now looking smoother than at first. The last addition, made with Energized Action, was numerous tiling problem corrections and masking corrections. The tileset is pretty much flawless now :) The final Beton is pretty nice to use. The tiles you would like to use are there, though eye-candy is still pretty scarce. I enjoyed making the pictured Energized Action level, Construction Site.

Since I am talking about Beton here, I might as well tell again the etymology of the tileset name Beton. I was a mere kid back those days (14 years), and didn't much think about the tileset names. Hence all the simple names Aztec, Beton and Rocks etc. I didn't pay much attention to the fact that there is no English word Beton. In Finnish there is, betoni. That means "concrete". Many sophisticated words (like science words) can be easily made English in Finland by taking out the last vowel of the word, like in my case 'betoni' to 'beton'. And so Beton was born.

Three songs enrich the past of Beton. One of them you have never heard in this context, the next you are very likely to be unknowing, and the last is most familiar to JJ2 community. The first track is Michiel van den Bos' "Run". Ringing any bells? :) Take your time to Google the name if you wish :) Yes, it is a track out of the original Unreal Tournament soundtrack, hailing from 1999. It was never meant to be released with the finished tileset, I just liked to hear the wonderful piece of module music while testing Beton. The next track was used in the first releases of Beton. It was called "Time Reflection" and composer was a Finnish guy Queek (of the group Probe). It was a slow track and had a dreamy atmosphere. I guess I wasn't so satisfied with it, because as of Blade's Battle Pack I Beton's official music has been "DreaM LanD" by DreaMSection. I like this track today, but it is definitely not amongst my favourite songs picked for the tilesets. Maybe I'll list these top5 songs later... Heck, I'll do it now :)

Now Blade lists his favourite JJ2 songs which he picked himself in the first place (lol)

1. World Of Dreams (Aztec)

2. The Summer Planet (Glacier)

3. Challenger (Woodlands)

4. Pools of Poison (Islands In The Sapphire Sea)

5. Static Universe (Forest)

The rest in order are: Organic (Twilight Park), Dreams Of Hope 2 (Space), Heatwave (Oasis), Mysterius Times (Rocks), DreaM LanD (Beton), System 51 (Desert) and Second Time (Wasteland).

I decided the order mostly by my affection to the songs. For example, lots of old memories surface when I listen to The Summer Planet. Some songs are just plain good, like Pools Of Poison. But more about these songs when their companions are introduced later in this blog.'

Well... what else? I think that's everything for now. See you later!

Tileset 1: Aztec

It's about time I got back here to tell some new stuff.

I regret to tell you guys, that Castle of Cadavers has not progressed as I previously wished. Because of this, I must add several months to the tileset release estimate. So, I believe I have the finished tileset for public download before the year changes. Sorry about this.

Now, I continue with my old tilesets. The first official of them all, Aztec. It's development to the final version (released with the grand single-player episode Energized Action, May 2003) took pretty much like five years, and it was first created at the same time as Bay and A-Space. I have a hunch that there was an ancient prototype version of the tileset very soon after I was given Jazz Jackrabbit 2 as a birthday present in 13th August 1998.

The tileset you see to the right is the oldest version I have left. I really don't have an idea how old it is, however, it is old. I know this because of the 4x4 tiles background image that I ripped from the 1998 3D action game Montezuma's Return. I marveled the graphics of that game, and took a part of it to myself :) As I did not undestand anything about palettes at that time, I threw the image away. It is actually possible, that the Montezuma game encouraged me to start making Aztec.
As you may know, I have never truly mastered the Jazz Jackrabbit 2 palettes (Just look at the Islands in the Sapphire Sea water in 8-bit mode), but before 2000, I never understood anything of it! The inability to learn the palettes is the cause there was no Blade releases before spring 2000. Well, I'd say you lost nothing. Just look at that Aztec draft, heh. However, I discovered something about the palettes in that spring. I would think that it was the Jazz Jackrabbit 2 palette template that I found from some tileset making guide. Before this, every sprite in my levels were black. This discovery led to quick development and quick release at Universe Jazz. Fortunate for me, Alienator, an admin of the site, gave it the best score.

Really fortunate. The first Aztec was really flawed, and was nothing near the quality of my later tilesets. I am not talking about graphics, but about tons of masking problems and tiling problems and other little glitches. The biggest of them all, the 8-bit colour mode incompatibility. That was a problem that I believe affected also Aztec's successor Beton and Beton's successor Rocks. Glacier could have been free of this stupidity... Anyway, the first Aztec is very different from the final version. The most visible change is that the version one had two warp backgrounds. It works, I was delighted to tell, but the second warp background had a certain infinity problem :) So, the night sky was removed later, and there has not been an Aztec night since. There were some other removed tiles that were not needed. Despite of all the tileset cleaning, Aztec tileset grew over 100 tiles to the final version in Energized Action. Most of the new tiles are easily viewable below the purple mountains in JCS.

I was satisfied with Aztec only after Energized Action was finished. No more tiling or masking problems, and the tileset was finally what I meant it to be in the first place. Sometimes I've thought that I should have left the tileset to the first version, but I know that wouldn't be possible. That infinity screenshot is taken from the oldest Aztec I have, version 2.5. The version numbers tell nothing, probably that it was the third revision of the tileset. I you look close enough, you can see many flaws. The vertical vines have them, the cracked bricks have them, the pillars, the small background bricks. Heck, the sky continues to infinity! Additionally, the first Aztec didn't have all the slopes ready for use. Some had to be mirrored for different kind of slopes. And if you tried to use an mirrored animation... well, that causes problems.

There is not much Aztec about Aztec. I have never though about that so much. It must be remembered, that I was twelve at the time of the naming. Twelve is no age for research. So, even greek letters made their way to the tileset! And apes and stuff, but that is a bit more understandable as Devan Shell could have summoned them somehow. To the right there is a picture from Aztec 2.5 from probably 2000 and then the Aztec level from Energized Action. I never numbered the Energized Action tileset versions, but I guess you could say that the final version is the fifth revision.


Aztec music is provided by an module artist named AlienZoul. He is definitely not a big name in the scenes, but I liked his music so much that I used two of his tracks in different versions of
Aztec. At first, there was "No One Like You". Pretty good dance track, but somehow empty. I thought it made a nice atmosphere to the tileset, and I left it there. It was probably Aztec version 3, introduced probably with Blade's Battle Pack I, that had as its music AlienZoul's "World Of Dreams". It is significantly better than

"No One Like You". Ever since the Battle Pack, this has been the official music of Aztec. It also remains as my favourite module music track. I just Googled with entry AlienZoul. It gives his name, Thomas Persson, and some of his music, but neither of these two. I spotted AlienZoul probably from the ModPlug Central, the home of the tracker program ModPlug Tracker. As there is no submitting possibility at the site anymore, ModPlug Central no longer recognizes AlienZoul.