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 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.

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!