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.

More Cadaver concepts

Hello once again dear readers.

I now know I have had at least eight readers since I have started writing this blog :) That is a start, yes, but I encourage everybody who visits my blog to comment anything you might come up with concerning this blog, my Jazz Jackrabbit 2 works or something else. What question would you like me to answer you? What would you like to read about in this blog? I am open for suggestions to make this blog more enjoyable!

Today I am back here to tell you more about the Castle of Cadavers project. There are two concept drawings I have made about the subject. I have already introduced the first one (see this post http://blade-of-finland.blogspot.com/2007/04/first-corpse-creation.html), and the second one, the one to your left, will work greatly as source material for the coming tileset drawing process.

It is a full A4-sized drawing with somewhat more mature ideas for the Castle of Cadavers. Like the first Cadaver concept, this one was drawn during my days in the military. In fact, these days were in the last of what spent in that institution. That means that I drew this in the end of March 2007. There are many details to this piece of work, as you can see. It will open best for the Finnish people, as the notes in this drawing are in finnish language. I will translate some of them to non-finnish speaking people.

This drawing shows you kind of an extended version of the tileset than that you saw in the first concept. The platforms divide to more tiles, like in the Holiday Hare '98 tilesets. Not like in Castle, where the main standing platform was one simple tile, if you wanted to. This makes the tileset more challenging to me to create. As you may see, I made a perspective mistake even to this drawing. The part in the upper left, the floor bricks should go diagonal right, but they don't. Otherwise this part shows quite much the feel I would like to have in the tileset. Really abandoned, really old, really decaying. The nature has taken over. Just as in my thoughts. If you have ever played the old game Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and The Flame, I am going for the atmosphere in the centuries old castle which had those detached heads floating all over. At least for the atmosphere I have in my memories about the place; I played that game like ten years ago :)

The other parts of the drawing show a small part of dungeon, and a clear outside area. At first, Castle of Cadavers project started as a dungeon project, but evolved to this current state while I was in the army. The dungeon idea had only inside areas to it. The dungeons in the coming Cadaver tileset will not have much stuff. Heck, it is a prison, who would have all that stuff stored in there? Again the inspiration comes from the old Prince of Persia 1, where the dungeons were very ascetic. As the drawing shows, some of the walls will be covered with darkness. This will make the whole place more ominous. The outside area shows the tileset when there are no layer 4 castles around. It may look like the The Secret Files' Haunted House tileset, but I will make it better. At least to my taste :) No see-through ground in Castle of Cadavers, that would be stupid. The background is a slightly rough terrain with those tree carcesses, rocks and gravestones everywhere. A distant castle could be nice to add. If it had one window with light in it, that would be scary, wouldn't it? :) It's fun to have stuff buried in the ground, The Twilight Park showed that. No one buries shovels this time though.

Now, to the texts. The dungeon part says primarily the following. The ground will be like in Twilight Park. Sometimes with lots of details, but when a level builder wants, it will be one-coloured. The dungeon will have small jail cells, but on the other hand it can have dramatic heights, just like those very unpractical prisons in Prince Of Persia 1. I have mentioned that we will probably see some torturing equipment, heaps of bricks and bones. Most probably full skeletons also. Collapse scenery events will be in frequent use.

A lot more notes on the outside area (finnish: ulkoilma). Outside area consists of grass and bricks, basically. There are plants everywhere, as can be the bricks. Nothing has fully survived the time except for the metal, and you will not see much of it. Lots of sturdy constructions like towers and pillars. The tileset will feature a cemetary with feral vegetation all over. A well will provide an access underground, where ever you like.

There is one part of the tileset not visible in this concept drawing. I haven't drawn it, and I believe I won't. It will be a small part of the tileset, and will work better that way. This part is a inside area, that would include a dining table with full meal served and with candles lit up. The wall clothings and other fabrics are in perfect shape, but there are nobody in sight. Eerie-o-meter goes for the maximum :)

Now you have seen all that there is to this tileset so far. The next picture I show you about Castle of Cadavers will be an actual part of the tileset. Until then... watch this space :P

P.S. A point of interest before the real ending for this post. When I was drawing this draft, I stored it in a public place. Well, in a public place for us military police men in our duty. During the two days storage somebody saw this drawing, and couldn't make any sense of it. Really, how could he? To outsiders it must seem that there is no point in this. So, because of this there is the comment in the middle (not written by me): "Kuka vittu sekoo käsiin?!". This literally means "Who the f*** is going mad?!". Well, I must be mad for doing this tileset stuff for almost ten years now. But what can I do, it's something I like very much.

The Blade tilesets you never saw

Summer is approaching, and so is the Castle of Cadavers development process :)


However, this time the subject is not the upcoming tileset, but the very beginning of my Jazz Jackrabbit 2 tileset making fever. Heck, at that time I didn't even use the nick you guys know me today.

I have little knowledge left of those early days. Almost nothing was saved to computer hard disks or if something was, it has been long gone from this newest machine I've been using. I have to rely on the early documents I included in my first public JJ2 releases and my dear teenager memories :)

I do not remember what my first tileset was like. Blade's Battle Pack (2000) readme implies, that before Aztec there could have been two to three experiment tilesets. Some of the JJ2 community people who were present in the Jazz2Online (http://www.jazz2online.com) in years around 2000-2001 may remember some of my talks about these covert operations. These two years were my most active in the Jazz Jackrabbit 2 community, as eight tilesets were released and continuously updated to new versions. Additionally, I spent a lot of time playing Jazz2 online. At those times I also uploaded some level packs. You may remember Another Dimension. It was a episode that featured every official Jazz2 there are. The first level in the episode, Spike Beach, is the first Blade level there is.

I can't tell you what I don't remember, so obviously, now comes the part that I know. Two tilesets were before Aztec. These were called A-Space and Bay. A-Space was a short lived space-tileset, where I added to the tileset a bunch of planet pictures from the Internet. The idea didn't work, although it was entertaining to walk on a miniature Saturn. The major problem was, that I didn't know how to get the 256-color palette working. My tileset source picture was in 256 colors, but I didn't realize that the game needs some colors from the palette to its own use. Outcome: the surroundings were in blossom with all known colors, but Spaz and Jazz are totally black. All the carrots, lizards, normal turtles and apples black, black, black. 14-year old me didn't know what to do. There is no picture left of A-Space. I don't think it is a major problem, I didn't use much time making the thing. I drew (and extercised copy-paste manouver) the tileset with attitude: "Let's see what happens when I do this".

In early 2000, some months before Aztec (here's a link to a slightly newer version of Aztec, although earliest that still exists in the Internet: http://www.jazz2online.com/J2Ov2/downloads/info.php?levelID=199) was released, I made a tileset called Bay. This is the tileset you see to your right, and as you can see, it shares many things with the Aztec tileset. Bay was the first tileset I knew how to handle the color palette, and lo, I had accomplished in making a working tileset. I vaguely remember that it was a day of great joy for me. For an unknown reason Bay was not released as my first JJ2 creation. I instead started to invest to a new tileset we now know as Aztec. One of the reasons I can think of is that Bay and Aztec were actually created simultaneously, and I thought Aztec to be more interesting idea. Bay was, after all, only a skeleton of a tileset with a few ground tiles and scarce mountains in the background. The airbrush-made clouds looked funny in the background layers 5-7, and were not looking very good with a warping background in layer 8.

The Bay version you see here is not exactly the first one. Above the darker mountains you see the one tile with the tileset palette in it. This one tile has been the key to me to make warping backgrounds to work in 8-bit mode in Jazz Jackrabbit 2. An old JJ2 buddy Iceman introduced this trick to me, and I have been using it ever since. Interestingly, I have never understood why one petty tile makes the color mode problems go away. This particular tile must act some part in the tileset compiling process.

One of the interesting facts visible in this Bay tileset is my nickname. I became Blade for good only a few months before the release of Aztec in the late Universe Jazz in March 2000. It shows that in Bay I was called "Giant". Heh. I speculated some options on nicknames, for example, the third option was "Atomic". Not so surprisingly, I got the "bright" idea when I was on a skiing trip in the northern Finland. I can't remember the origin of the nick Blade. I probably used the name for the first time in 1998 when I used to take part in conversation in the Internet chat rooms (Kiss.fi ^^). I am pretty sure the name Blade is taken from the 1998 feature film, which I didn't even see before the new millenium.

The first corpse creation!

Hello world!

I couldn't resist from adding this second entry to the blog. Then I am going in for the studies (I wish...?)!

This picture here is the first Castle of Cadavers illustration there is, and the second JJ2 tileset illustration I have ever made. More about this later on. The most important part of this mess was already released in the JJ2 community forums, but here I present the thing in its full glory :P

Some interesting facts surround this creation. It was drawn in December 2006 in the Defense Forces of Finland (http://www.mil.fi/english/) during my nine-month military service (Blade is a military police man, stand aside!!). The Cadaver part (which, by the way looks much like I'd like to replicate it in digital manner) introduces several types of things you can expect to see in the future set. Chains, some more chains with skeletons, more or less broken bricks, vegetation everywhere to add ancient feel and dark background layers, that are in this drawing:

- Nightsky and moon in the layer 8 (warp background is probably not returning to this set)
- Far away cemetary hills with leafless trees and old tombstones in layer 7
- Dark fortress walls in layer 6
- I'd like to reserve layer 5 for layer-4 related tricks, but if not, we will see more tombstones and cranky trees

The tower you see in the "layer 4" area will be difficult for me to replicate with the computer. I would very much like to make it like the big trees in Agama's outstanding tileset classic Swamp of The Sleeping Jaguar (http://www.jazz2online.com/J2Ov2/user/profile.php?userID=294). This would allow level makers to build exactly as high towers as they wish to. To add variation, some of the bricks from the walls will be missing and have a dark spot in the place. A feel of decaying is achieved with this.

The intended atmosphere will be a mixture of grim and playful. This is, despite of everything, easily done: although the tileset palette will be dark and landscapes with all the tombs won't appear so cheerful, all the skeletons around will be cartoonish. To emphasize the style, there could also be something like the crazy gazes from the windows like in this Cadaver illustration you see here in this entry.

You could be wondering, why did Blade choose this rotten, decaying, disintegrating pile of brick dust to be his next project. There are many castle tilesets made before this, even the original 'Castle'. Does the JJ2 community really need another one? Many great -unique- tileset ideas remain unused. Do I waste my time? I would say that if I pick an idea for a tileset, I have something of my own to say. About the tileset idea thinking process: I simply come up with some nice ideas, and pick the most appealing idea. This doesn't mean I will not get back to my earlier ideas. In fact, right now I have so good ideas for tilesets, I KNOW I will be back for them. Let me list them for you:

• Seven Chasms of Abomination. It's a spectacular underground cave with subterranean lakes and stuff. Ground will be created a bit like in the original 'Hell' tileset.
• Tellus Rising. Moon tileset! No space stations, just like Buzz and Neil left it ;)
• Aztec Reprise. Aztec tileset lifted up to a new glory.
• Winter War. Snowy forest with destroyed military hardware everywhere...

Don't get too excited pals, Castle of Cadavers first :) The Cadaver tileset illustration gets its backbone from several different directions. These clues will be essential when making Cadaver tileset reality. The ideas in this illustration are taken from the original Jazz Jackrabbit 2 tilesets 'Castle' and the The Secret Files 'Haunted House'. The Donald Duck artist Don Rosa influences me as well, as it has been for many years. For example, the tileset Desert wouldn't have been created without one particular Don Rosa Donald Duck (Three Caballeros) series. Through some twisted way of fate, the tower in my illustration gets its base idea from the Moomin house! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moomins). The TV-Show 'Muumit' was around for every single year of my childhood, and haunts me to this day :) Also a mention about Disguise's Corrupted Sanctuary. After seeing this great piece of work I though for the first time of doing a castle tileset of my own.

A word about the other stuff in the paper. The text "Tai R.I.C. = Rest In Chaos = Soukkari tykkäis = No rest for the wicked" (Translated "Or R.I.C. = Rest In Chaos = Soukkari would like it = ...) is a homage to my conscript friend. Soudunsaari was a hard cooked death metal listener and his playlist featured songs like "Dead Human Collection" by Cannibal Corpse and "Drilling For Brains" by Mortician. These were so grotesque names that I found them actually amusing. To pay homage to my friend, you might find texts like this in the tileset if searched properly...

As well, I drew the baby and the text to this paper. It says "Me before the military. The Defence Forces made me a man". That's a parodic observation about the days in the military. Even 20 year old men can be enormously childish under the circumstances in that organisation.

...And that's Soudunsaari who claims that Jose Barroso is evil :D

Blade begins

This entry launches the one and only Blade blog. Welcome aboard people! :)

First some answers. I do not thoroughly know who will read this blog over the time, and I won't assume that you readers know who is this guy Blade.

I am Blade, a character from Finland. Years ago, in 1998, I received a birthday present of my life. It was the PC platformer game Jazz Jackrabbit 2. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_Jackrabbit_2), sequel of the widely known classic computer game Jazz Jackrabbit. JJ2 offers its players a chance to make their own levels to the game and create new environments (tilesets) by drawing them for example with the modest painting program Microsoft Paint. I believe I started experimenting with JJ2 levels and tilesets because I felt the original levels didn't match with the outstanding graphical quality of the original tilesets. Epic MegaGames pretty much wasted all the superior 2D graphics because of rushed level design. In addition, the single player campaign is finished in few hours. Things led to another, and here I am, planning my 14th tileset, codename Castle of Cadavers :)

The reason this blog was created comes here. I feel the need of documenting the whole Castle of Cadavers creation process. Firstly, I feel like owing this to you JJ2 community guys because of the countless silent months I've been having over the years. Also, there has been very little information on the previous tilesets, and I would like to write the stuff to paper (or similar :) ). With this blog I intend to:

1. Record the planning and drawing phases of the upcoming 14th JJ2 tileset.
2. Tell about the problems and slowdowns I know I will encounter :)
3. List a lot of points of interest
4. Show many pictures of the coming tileset.

However, this blog is not all about Castle Of Cadavers. I plan to go through also my old tilesets one by one, and tell many interesting things about them you haven't even imagined before. One upcoming topic will be the Blade tilesets before the Aztec set (It's actually my third tileset! ;) )

Unfortunately I have some bad news to tell. I won't be updating this blog very often this spring. I must concentrate on the economy studies I have and the test in June will decide lots of things about my future. This is the reason this Blade really begins some time after 19th of June, 2007.

Stay on the same channel, maybe I still have some quick additions to the blog before June ;) Jazz Jackrabbit 2 forever!