DDD 41: The Finishing Line

41. 12 January 2008

And so the Dungeon is finished. Or should I for once use the correct name, Fortress of Forgotten Souls. The tileset is finished at least when looking in numbers, as now all 1010 tiles are used, and would I say, efficiently. I didn't expect to finish this this early, but I spent a lot of time working on the tileset today. And voilà, this is finished. The only problem I am having now is the dysfunctional 8-bit water. It doesn't work. For some reasons the "tops" of the waves become overcoloured indicating that there is something wrong in the Fortress palette. Strangely enough, everything works underwater, the grass, warp background, dirt. All but the bricks. It remains to be seen if I intend to do something with this. I may lose some points at J2O for partially not functioning tieset palette. I doubt, however, that this is a pretty trivial problem now in the year 2008, when most of the people have very powerful computers capable of showing JJ2 in 16-bit color mode.

So, let's write down what led to the finalization of Fortress. First I drew next to the large cross a smaller grave stone. It doesn't look that spectacular, but I accepted it anyway. Then I came up with an idea of a fence which I created with haste and a small amount of tiles. In addition, it is easy to expand the fence to a complex construct, so I consider these tiles extremely well used. Then I thought about some stuff to put inside the ground and created two sets of stones, one for the masked and one for the unmasked dirt ground. They ended up looking real nice, if you restrain yourself from putting them absolutely everywhere. The darker large stone (2*2 tiles in size) is the last tile to be finished in the tileset.

At some point today I re-designed the water drops. The earlier ones looked too much like clustered water. I did some stars for a clear night sky background option. Two of the stars can be animated. Brilliantly the single animation pictures can also be used as still stars. That's genious! :)

It's also the time to think about the whole creation process of Fortress. I am pretty pleased with this finished tileset. It is extensive for varied use, lots of stuff everywhere. Although not so extensive in stuff and colors as Twilight Park was, it doesn't bother me. Fortress couldn't have been a colourful tileset at any point. I was fortunate to think about changing the warp background color to red as it provides a great change from the very greyish nature of Fortress. Now that this darker tileset is done, I can return to lighter themes, like the forgotten island I was thinking about in December.

The Fortress of Forgotten Souls shows again that it is impossible for me to stick in the plan. I made some great concept art, but in the end I didn't follow that stuff so much. Fortress looks good once finished, but on the way to finishing line I had tons of worries about the way the tileset was turning out. Mostly I am now thinking about all the missing human (or hare-like) stuff in Fortress. Originally I had ideas of skulls and bones and coffins in this tileset but at some point I just dropped the idea. It is a dark tileset, but for some reason there is no space for skeletons. Weirdly enough, in Twilight Park there was. This must mean Blade isn't that sharp after all but all soft rubber :D On the contrary to all my Fortress troubles, the grass/dirt land was created mostly without pain. It all looked very grim in October but got better after that. Because of the October grass land troubles I think I left the tileset making for a whole month.

With this diary I can track down how long it took to create Fortress of Forgotten Souls. The answer is close to 45 working sessions. I would have thought that I would have needed more sessions, but no. This means that I made the tileset at 22,444 tiles speed for one session. But now that seems to be very much. When thinking about the used time, one session took averagely some two hours. Some sessions were longer so let's keep to 2,6 hours. With this it can be calculated that Fortress is a fruit of 112,5 working hours. Again, that's not so much to me. It's like I would have done the whole thing in four days and 16 hours! This sounds absurd when remembering that Fortress was in active creation from August to January. Of course the whole Fortress process was way longer than 112 hours as the Fortress idea was conceived in December 2006. Let's think about that next.

Originally the idea for Fortress of Forgotten Souls is pretty old, probably five years. For some reason the Fortress idea came back to me after Twilight Park and in the military service (that was nine months in '06-'07) I started to think what it should look like. I had strong intentions to have the tileset ready in summer 2007 but many things got in between resulting in that I had virtually nothing done at the beginning of August. Some of the reasons are as follows. In the spring I was studying to be a student in university of economics (that was not successful). In June I was used to do nothing with the tileset but the promises for a new tileset in J2O forums kept me trying a little at least. In the summer I did only unsuccessful tries to start the stabile creation. These were the same I showed in this blog about a year ago. In addition there was trips to various places and hanging around with friends. I had no job at the time and that should have enabled me to do something, but no :) During these many years of Jazz Jackrabbit 2 tileset making I have come to realize that I have to have a strong inspiration to do even one tile that looks good. That inspiration is hard to find. As proof it has been now two years from the release of Twilight Park. Man, I am slow. It's hard to know why everything started to work in August. I just said to myself that this has to start working and then tried until it did.

There are four stages in Fortress of Forgotten Souls creation. The planning continued from December 2006 to August 2007, the first development stage in August that year, the second starting in October and lasting until November and the third development stage started in December and stopped with the finishing of Fortress today. The most important stages were the second and third where the tileset got its finalized look and I made the tileset theme clear for myself. Everything started in the first stage, but at that time things were messy and undecided.

In the first stage the basic bricks and the first graveyard background were finished. The progress was pretty good, but the happy stage of getting forward was stopped with the beginning of my studies at one particular university of applied sciences. That was indeed also very happy time with hanging out with like 50 new people from which many became my friends. Being hardly 20 years old, checking out the girls and hanging out in parties (many, many parties) took a lot of my efficient time away.

The second stage of Fortress development included a lot of improvements. The creation of dark background bricks and finalization of all masked brick tiles resulted in a somewhat working tileset. I started working with the dirt ground but lousy success in that area depleted my inspiration for some period of time. In the end of the second stage Fortress was fully playable and included all the important stuff but nothing else.

And again the place of my studies got a better of me (or more specifically, the social events surrounding the studies :) The end of November and the beginning of December had so many events in it that I was not thinking about my half-way ready tileset at all. It would seem that if I am having too much to think about, the tileset progress is in jeopardy. I can conclude, that when nothing happens in my life, tileset making is easier. In addition of the university, many computer games occupied me along the way. From August to January I actually finished all of these games: Psychonauts, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Episode One, GTA San Andreas and Jade Empire. In addition, at some points of the autumn I played a lot of Stepmania, the PlayStation2 dance mat game converted to personal computers. All of these games took tons of my time, and especially while playing San Andreas it was more fun to return to that game, not to Paint Shop Pro and Fortress.

The third and last stage of Fortress development got its full power from the christmas vacation, a time when all the social stuff ceased for a few weeks. At the same time I got a great mood of doing something new to the tileset every day. The third stage included at last success with the dirt/grass ground, almost all eye candy (with the exception of the spider web I designed in October). As you can observe from this blog, every screenshot of Fortress here looks simple before getting to the end of December. Finally I got the background layer stuff in order, that had bugged me since the beginning of making of Fortress. Even this stage included some paralyzing phases but for some reason this time the recovery (heh) did not take weeks, but days. And so we arrive at this point we're standing now.

I haven't started making the example single player level yet, but that shouldn't take too long. The thing that will take more time is that making the example level is actually beta testing of my tileset. I don't need to externalize the beta testing as I discover all the problems when moving forward with the level design. For this reason it is important to make a good and varied level for the tileset release. I can notice that I need some new tiles, but there is not much space to juggle with. Still I am greatly bothered by the 8-bit color mode related problems, but I will probably just ignore the whole thing. 

I have liked a lot of making this tileset, and at this point I believe I will be back with more tilesets soon enough. At that time my operation system has changed to Windows Vista and my monitor is a widescreen one, but I am not yet ready to say goodbye to Jazz Jackrabbit 2. If I have been in the circles for a ten years, why stop now? I know that someday the last of my tilesets will be released, but I will not bother myself of thinking about that. Until that time I will enjoy drawing these tileset, seeing them become better day by day and finally see the opinions of JJ2 community at Jazz2Online. Finishing a tileset (Fortress was finished quite exactly at 22:02 tonight) is one of the most rewarding experiences I know. Why, that's a harder question. It could be the striving to make a finished product for so long and starting from a point where the tileset looks impossible to make reality. The strong effort turns into something tangible, that's just something.

This entry is not the last in this Fortress creation blog, although the end is very near. If I write something here after this, that's because of the little things added alongside with making of the example level for J2O release. The last spring, when I published the idea of making a tileset creation diary, I soon came to thoughts that maybe the promise was not a good thing. I am beginning to see that this is not the case. If these texts and images survive in my hard drives or in the internet for long enough, these will be a lot of fun to browse through. All the other folks could be more interested in comparing the screenshots.

So, thank you and goodbye! Making of Fortress of Forgotten Souls was a great part of my life in the autumn 2007, and I had a lot of fun. To the very end I add some music I was listening when making this tileset. Usually I keep my Winamp running all the time I am making tilesets, but only certain tracks deserve mentioning here. The numbers mark the stages these songs influenced. The X's cannot be affliated with any stage. I love all of these songs, they gave me a fire giant strength for all the fall :) 

1. In Flames - Suburban Me
1. Second Spring - Irresistible

2. Mike Foyle - Shipwrecked (John O'Callaghan vs. Mike FOyle Club Mix) or (Gareth Emery Remix)
2. Mike Foyle - Love Theme Dusk

3. Norther - Going Nowhere
3. The Mystery - Feel 4 You (Original Vocal Mix)
3. Loituma - Ievas Polka (Basshunter Remix)

X. Woody Van Eyden - Unfinished Symphony
X. Kissogram vs. Woody - If I Had Known This Before (Woody's Fumakilla XTC-Express-MiX)
X. Led Zeppelin - When The Levee Breaks
X. Led Zeppelin - Good Times Bad Times

Tileset 6: Wasteland

Finding the fun in writing these retrospective entries again, I am back to tell you all about Wasteland I can remember.

I still amaze myself sometimes with my working esteem back in the days (essentially year 2000). A whole lot of tilesets in addition with several single player things and battle packs. Between the fifth Blade tileset Desert and the next tileset Wasteland, I took some time to create the much praised Blade's Battle Pack. Nowadays I am pretty critical on anything about the Blade's Battle Packs. I think it's generally very okay, since they are made in a early point of my tileset making "career" and include the first, and also less developed tilesets and levels made by me. In addition, today I appreciate single player levels over battle levels. This opinion really could drive me into creating Energized Action 2! :) That'd be fun, I've made three more tilesets since that 2003 level pack.

It is likely that Wasteland was under development simultaneously with Blade's Battle Pack. My notes say that it took me one month to make Wasteland, a pretty long development cycle comparing to earlier releases. Not to complain, because I would release the seveth tileset, Woodlands, seven months after Wasteland. And from that, you all know, the developing times tended to stretch longer and longer. The thought about a techno style tileset is probably inspired by Dethman's famous 7th Lava Fall tileset, a truly classic Jazz Jackrabbit 2 tileset even with its flaws of somewhat raw structure (my guess about that: imported graphics from another application and dropping down the color amounts). I feel I could mime 7th Lava Fall way better nowadays, but at the end of 2000, Wasteland was all I could do. Not that I was making a copy anyway :) I was satisfied with the finished Wasteland. It is my first tileset that starts to resemble my later tilesets. This is because during Wasteland creation process I suddenly noticed, that I am not using enough shades of each colors. This made me move from the regular 8 shades of each colors (JJ2 basic palette had previously dictated my shade use) to 16 shades per colour. I had started to make the basic tiles of Wasteland but then took some time to enhance the tiles with more colors. The picture here shows a part of the original mask picture of Wasteland. It still has the 6-shade versions of all tiles. The result was superior comparing to my earlier works, and actually this led me to update all the warp backgrounds of the previous tilesets. I shipped those new versions with Blade's Battle Pack 2 in early 2001.

There is not much to tell about the drawing process, I feel it progressed very smoothly. Apart from the enhanced colors, there is little new in Wasteland. It is a basic block structure tileset like Aztec and Rocks. Tilesets like that are easy to start with and continue. To think it, the pipes are a new and essential thing to my tilesets. They play a important role in masked tiles and as well as eye candy. When making a Wasteland level, pipes and the background metal blocks must be used creatively as no else eye candy is available. I probably started to make the tileset a way where I did not plan any special eye candy stuff in it, and hence I couldn't think of anything when the tileset creation progressed.

From all of my tilesets, it feels like it is Wasteland I couldn't lay down to rest. There was always something to mess with. The basic versions of Wasteland are very alike. The initial release was released in 10 November 2000, as a expansion to Blade's Battle Pack - something I wouldn't have done today. Those battle level compilations were a honour thing for me back then, for the time of 2000-2001, and after that I have concentrated on the single player side of Jazz Jackrabbit 2 as it is closer what I would like to play. Released as "Wasteland" in Jazz2Online, it fared pretty good. Scored with 8.4, it was my top tileset achievement at that point. Like with the other tilesets, a got a lot of positive feedback on Wasteland. That has always encouraged me to create even more tilesets. After the first release a slight update was with Blade's Battle Pack 2 in February 2001, and finally that final release with Energized Action in 2003. My tileset building was pretty established at the end of 2000, and I didn't need to change much, only some little mask problems with tiles representing vines.

Wasteland is also pretty rich with unreleased or semireleased add-ons. Many of you may remember the Wasteland Second Edition. Remaining still on my computer, withdrawn from the Internet, I can get the information that I made that version in July 2001, most probably just after Woodlands release. Leaving Wasteland without background stuff bothered me half an year, and in the summer 2001 I tried to fix my previous decisions to what I thought was best for the tileset. So I added stuff for two background layers by actually copying the round hills from Desert and creating weird looking factory buildings. I added the new Second Edition to Blade's Battle Pack 2 with the release of Forest in September 2001. People at Jazz2Online seemed not to like much the update and this quickly led me to abandon the Second Edition. The strongest thing I did was not to include the hills and the "giant paper bags with straws", like Cell wittingly said, to the definitive release Energized Action. Summing this mess up, I was not completely satisfied with the lack of background stuff in Wasteland. That led me to create that missing art, but didn't notice them to be unimportant early enough. and lo, the Second Edition mess is complete.

A Wasteland Evening was also made. I never released as I looked it as a test would it look interesting enough. I thought not, because a color modification should change lots of colors, but in Wasteland's case, there was only on used, grey. It is a miracle I managed to make Wasteland look interesting with basically one color. So, Wasteland Evening exists and works well with this more warmer appearance. The screenshot here shows the tileset applied on Energized Action level "Grey Matter Adventure". Also the Second Edition screenshot was based on the level by the way.

Like with Desert, I chose a work of the Finnish artist Quasian for Wasteland. Called "Second Time", I actually used it as a music in my less known capture the flag level Blast The Bunny. In short, I created it because I wanted to use Mez's MEZ02 better I did in an ancient SP episode of mine "Another Dimension", in secret level "Hulabaloo". Accessed from the first level, "Spike Beach". The reason for re-use was simple, I thought Second Time fitted Wasteland good, and no one would mind if I would have same music in two levels. Especially when Blast the Bunny was not so popular amongst J2O community.

5 June 2008 note: As I am now talking about the block structure tilesets, I could notify you about my future tileset plans. I have told you about Winter War and Seven Depths of Abomination plans, but there are also thoughts on revisiting Aztec and making it new and shining. That'd be cool, maybe it could be a anniversary release in 2010 :D In the mean time, maybe I take that Viking idea you've been telling me about into consideration... :)

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 entry 14

Hello all,

Now everybody can see the finished state of Fortress of Forgotten Souls, as I released it at Jazz2Online yesterday (http://www.jazz2online.com/J2Ov2/downloads/info.php?levelID=4986). The feedback has been awesome so far, thanks everybody! Here in this blog I continue to explain the developments in the tileset in October 2007. There are about 25 entries left to write :)

14. 24th October 2007

As the screenshot shows, the background bricks now have fully black parts. I built an extensive set of tiles to shape the black parts and additionally shape the corners of the background bricks when exiting interior spaces to outside air. This far it all looks pretty simplistic, but maybe eye candy will compensate all this. A little more variation to the background bricks, and I will move to make the dark parts to the solid layer 4 bricks. After all this the tileset should start looking like something :)

I believe I will scrap the idea of a steep slopes. They just don't look like something from the idea of Dungeon. In addition, there will not be diagonal parts in the ceilings. This will not harm the developing tileset in any way. I can always make something else.

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.

I actually made something!

Hello people!

I have something to show, folks. It is, essentially, old bricks. But not just any bricks, they're Castle Of Cadavers bricks! Please, try not to faint. I know, I know, this is ground-breaking :)

What you see here, is actually the fourth generation of Cadaver bricks I have experimented with. The first one looked pretty stupid. They were probably not so bad, but it's something like this I'm looking for. Maybe I'll release all the brick generations at some point. These bricks here will provide a solid wall for the various ruins that will be scattered all over Castle of Cadavers levels. I must point out, that these tiles will most probably change before you get to download the whole tileset from Jazz2Online. I am sorry to say, but that is still a far, far away date. These blocks are pretty much there is in this tileset right now.


My obligations to the studies are now over so, expect many additions to this blog during the summer and late summer. Unfortunately for the tileset creation progress I'll be going to the U, S and A in like, 24 hours. That will halt the progress for two weeks. I really hope to get the basic blocks of the Cadaver finished after the trip. After the basic essential tiles are done, I am fast at finishing the rest :)

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.