Tileset 5: Desert

I am paying a visit to my old computer and so I can now explain something about tileset five, Desert.

Pretty soon after finishing Glacier in early September 2000, I started to think about the next tileset. There is little information left what were the alternatives I thought about concentrating on, but making the decision didn't take long keeping in mind that the first released Desert version was done on 29 September 2000. I have notes that say that finishing this tileset took a long time. Heh, "hardly" says Blade in 2008. The initial inspiration to start making the tileset was once again influenced by Donald Duck comic artist Don Rosa with his series "The Three Caballeros Ride Again", published in Finland just at that time. What impressed me in that was the way all the Mexican cliffs and rocks were drawn. They were done a way I thought would look cool in a new tileset. Mostly I replicated Don Rosa's style in the background layer desert landscape. Many of you who can get your hands on the particular comic series will probably not recognise any similarities with what I did with Desert and what is in "The Three Caballeros Ride Again", but there they are, Don Rosa influences.

In many ways I consider Glacier and Desert brother tilesets. They are of the same size, contain same type of tiles (I've always had the feeling that Desert is Glacier turned hotter) and have similar eye candy content all the way to the lone flower. They were released between small intervals. From these two, Glacier has always been more pleasing to me and Desert is some kind of middle work with little progress in graphics compared to the previous release. Apart from all this bashing Desert still achieves a nice atmosphere and the tileset can be used to make a good basic desert level in your episode :) In my case, Energized Action. What was new in Desert was the tampering of the original Jazz Jackrabbit 2 palette color entries. For unknown reason I changed only the greens that affect barrels. Pretty surely it is accidential that the result made the tileset feel dryer as anything that would appear lush and lively (foods and carrots) now look like they have had lots of heat in the recent time and not so much water.

I released Desert in Jazz2Online for the first time in 29 September 2000. Since then there have been at least three new versions. All the versions are 1; the initial release, 2; Blade's Battle Pack update in late 2000, 3; Blade's Battle Pack 2 update in early 2001 and 4; Energized Action final version from 2003. The initial release in Jazz2Online was in fact named "Burning Desert" emphasizing the fact that I no longer released my tileset with useless example levels, but functioning battle levels. This was done for the first time in the later releases of Glacier. I started to do this because the fall 2000 was my "golden time" in Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Internet multiplayer. Although never really becoming a formidable Jazz2 internet player and never joining any clans, I had lots of fun (e.g. Blade & Aiko tha iSDN Army (tm) :P). For the Internet reasons I started concentrating on battle levels and this later resulted in creation of the Blade's Battle Pack - well - battle packs.

Burning Desert did well in J2O. Today it has a average score of 8 with seven reviewers. Some remarks were made on the music choice and the eye candy content. As many of my early tilesets, Desert had many problems I left undealt. A major one was the broken warp background in 8 bit color modes. This was finally fixed with the Blade's Battle Pack update with the JJ2 community figure Iceman's aid. The next time Desert popped into general public in Blade's Battle Pack 2 with 20 more tiles. These are 100 per cent essential tiles that should have been in the first release. Like with rest of my tilesets, a final version of Desert was released with Energized Action single player episode in 2003. As I was starting to get better in planning my releases, not so much changes were made to Desert version 3. The new 4 updated the masking to flawless and added further 10 more essential tiles. Nothing mind blowing, but especially dealing with flawed masks is really important for comfortable use of any tileset. It appears that I had some plans on making a night version of Desert. A file named DesertNight.pcx on my computer indicates this, although the insides is identical with the day version.

The above screenshot of Burning Desert exhibits the first version charasteristics of Desert. Here the altered basic color entries are visible with the brown barrel and the first version warp background is less smooth than it would later be. Mostly, as I told before, the largest changes made in Desert over the years remain in the mask side of the tileset.

There is not much to say about the music choice of Desert, System 51. Is is an energetic rock release from Finnish musician Quasian. I have no clue how I came across this release, but one possibility is that I was browsing through Assembly computer event (held every year in Helsinki, Finland) music competitions, where Quasian had success in 1998 with this track. In today's point of view I feel System 51 is way too loud and restless. Today I'd choose something more smooth but oh well, seven and half years have passed. Quasian seems to be so different name, that Google finds him easily. There's a homepage left at quasian.modulaatio.com and a entry in Last.fm.

Tileset 4: Glacier

Away from the Fortress of Forgotten Souls for the duration of this entry.

Glacier was pretty fast in production after Rocks was finished. For a Blade release, I was designing something I hadn't done before, a complete world with tiles that are not independent blocks anymore. Of course Beton was like this, but with the artificial environment and the inspiration recieved from Mez's sets, I don't regard it as the step forward, but Glacier.



With the inspiration that came I don't remember where, it took probably one month to make the tileset from scratch to a complete Jazz Jackrabbit 2 release. I do not have much to tell about the developing phase of this tileset, but something what happened after the finalization of the first version. As most of my readers may know, the earlier tileset I did had many different versions. Some of them were corrections to the previous ones, some of them really were *different versions* with different stuff in them (varying backgrounds etc.). Initially, Glacier was a The Secret Files release. I probably did not understand the disadvantages this brought to everyone not owning TSF. At the same time, Universal Jazz stopped functioning, and quite shortly I was told about a new center for all Jazz 2 related stuff, Jazz2Online (This was probably you, EvilMike :).



It is this way I did my first J2O upload. This upload is no longer available anywhere, and the standalone Glacier upload in J2O known as "Frosty Fighting" is marked v1.2, the first tileset conversion of me not requiring TSF. It must have been all the reviewers that told me to switch back to Jazz Jackrabbit 1.23. I did, no TSF stuff after that. Anyway, the oldest Glacier version I have on my computer is marked v1.1. The TSF version misses dozens of tiles that are included in v1.2 and the final version (you could probably name that the version 1.3, if you wanted) delivered with 2003 release Energized Action. It also "features" a very mixed up palette what led for example stupid looking warp background when looking with 8-bit color modes. As all my other early tilesets, Glacier had a bad mask in the beginning. This was fixed with the above mentioned Energized Action.



Today I am still quite pleased with Glacier. The stalactites (yes, they are not ice) are actually very good looking, and all the ground ice is shining very convincingly. I did not surpass this graphical quality with the next tileset, Desert, I would say. What I could have done better was the treeline, which is completely tilted. In addition, I must have felt that all the black inside the ground is boring, so I created the icy stuff on the black background. You may have noticed or not, I have never used them when I have used the tileset in my levels. They look ugly and I myself can't find a good place to put them to!



As many other of my sets, Glacier has an unreleased color modification called Cavern. That was an experiment to see if the set could be converted to a cave. I did it, and it was easily done. For reasons unknown, I never used Cavern in any of my releases. Maybe I thought it was unimportant. And nowadays when I look at it, I can say the same: it does not bring anything new to the Glacier scheme. Anyway, I will share this picture of Cavern with you. It is the Energized Action level "The Great Glacier" as seen with Cavern tileset.



Glacier features the music track "Summer Planet" by DJ TheCrown. To my rememberings, I found it at ModPlug Central (now defunct). I immediately liked the track and tried it with my tileset and left it there. It still sounds very good in the background of Glacier and even though DJ TheCrown made the track while thinking a beautiful, hot summer (as mentioned in the .xm comments) it still sounds somehow chilly to me :) At least very energetic, that is an important thing.

Dungeon development diary 1-2

Hello posse!

Here begins the real development diary I have been promising. I will refer to Castle of Cadavers as "Dungeon" from now on, because there is no chance that the tileset would be named Castle of Cadavers. That name has never satisfied me. So, it is codename Dungeon from now on :) After the simple name period (e.g. Desert, Glacier) I have liked to name the tilesets more specifically, but leave one word to shorten it to (e.g. Islands). This will be the case also this time. Expect some really witty name for the tileset! :P

Now to the diary. To date there are 23 diary entries. These 23 entries accompany 19 pictures or screenshots from the development process, so you will have lots to see. Today I translate you entries 1 to 2, and some days after 3 and 4. The fifth entry comes with the first Dungeon gameplay screenshot there is. From that point all of the entries will be added to this blog separately. Some of the entries are not very long.

I consider that the Dungeon development process started in August, but there are some things I did before that. For example, I have had an empty Dungeon.pcx in my computer for at least few years. I don't really remember when I created it or how it would have looked. More recently, in the spring, I created the first brick tiles, which, I think, can be seen in the picture below. The Dungeon development diary starts from July 2007.

1. 4th July 2007

Third attempt made to make the basic brick tiles work. These new ones look pretty good to me. They could end up in the final tileset release.

2. 14th August 2007

To add more variation, I made more of the same style bricks like I did in July. Unfortunately these don't look as good as the originals. There is one particular stone that dominates the big picture too much. I probably have to redraw both of the brick tiles, and remove the domination problem that way. I have the models to base the new ones, that should prove it pretty easy task to do.

17th November note: What's in the picture: in the lines 1-3 are the first generation bricks made probably in the early summer 2007. They didn't look good and that reduced the will to make more proposals. Line 4: the second generation showed the way to the third that looked the best of these brick tiles. Line 6-7: These are the tiles I speak in these two diary entries. Tile 4*6 is the one that has the domination problem. In the right there are three steps visible how the brick tiles were made. In the two bottom lines are the ground tiles that preceded the ones that are used in the current version of Dungeon. They look very much like those in Twilight Park :)

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.