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

DDD 40: Bunch o' gravestones

40. 11 January 2008

A creative day in perspective of tileset progression, although not so much space was used. I did a small stone for layer three and two gravestones for layer four. The cross and the gravestone were created easily with help of reference pictures found with browsing Google. Especially the gravestone looks good. The cross isn't bad, but its shape brings jawed edges and even my beloved anti-alias drawing style didn't cover it all up. Now there are 46 tiles of empty space. This is just great :)

22 June 2008 note: that gravestone I am talking about in this entry is seen in the 36th screenshot provided above. The text is actually just font Symbol, and it reads Hyvä Tampere, meant to mean "Good job, Tampere". Tampere is a city located in Finland. The reason this text is there is unknown for me. I could have put there something that would have amused me or mean something to me or somebody else, like the whole JJ2 community, but for some damned reason I just came up with this, and put it to the tileset :)

DDD 39: Trees

39. 9 January 2008

Nothing else today but making of three different trees for layer four. It was actually very simple task, but full of working in pixel size scale. There are possibilities to add the trees to brick and sand ground. 67 tiles to go!

19 June 2008 note: Dungeon development diary is going to be back for three times after this entry. To your knowledge, the entry going with number 41 is a gigantic text about finishing Fortress of Forgotten Souls and if this development hasn't been interesting, that entry might be :)

DDD 38: Small but vital additions

38. 8 January 2008

The updates today are small in size, but still a good start for the eye candy part of Dungeon. I have 98 tiles empty space (aiming for the size 1010 tiles like before) left to work with. I did some grass and weed originally for layer five, but they fit well the the fourth one also. In addition I made the tileset more efficient by replacing duplicate tiles with actually new ones, like the normal brick platform can no grow grass. Brilliant idea to my opinion, and I can't believe I didn't think of it earlier. The 34th screenshot shows these fractures a bit.

I did some foreground stones for layer three and two spiky bushes for layer four. They proved to be a nice addition to the tileset. Tweaking the warp background, smoothing of sawed edges. The last thing I did for today was a gravestone for layer three that looks like a milestone.

DDD 37: Ditching the wall

37. 7 January 2008

I have been working in the past days without making diary entries. I am summing it up now. For example, I was completely broken yesterday so that I had no intentions on writing anything anywhere. I almost didn't have the motivation to draw, but I did the sloping grass lands anyway. Today the slopes got their rocks on them, and a new eye candy element window was finished very quickly. 32th screenshot show that the dirt ground can now be shadowed, if there are bricks above.

The biggest change in Dungeon for a while was scrapping the layer six great wall. I came to that solution when I couldn't make it look good enough in the time I was concentrating on it. So it had to be a bad idea. I replaced the wall with near layer 5 gravestones and normal stones, and the result looks magnificent. This is the way it should go. With the background stuff finished, I can finish the last remaining tiles, eye candy tiles. The layer 5 can get something more, and I will add for the level makers convenience an option to not to use the warp background. Stars and moon will appear. Maybe I'll update the rain tiles.

DDD 36: Concentrating on background stuff

36. 5 January 2008

I didn't have so much time to give to Dungeon today, but the following was done. The warp background, as I said yesterday, came easily to its final smooth version. I did a 512*512 tiling texture with the program XFader giving the brightest and darkest colors for it from my 8 bit Dungeon palette. After this reducing the color scale with Paint Shop Pro 8 was easy and was finished with haste. The earlier version looked rude, because I had done the palette entries for the warp background before and then copy-pasted Twilight Park's warp background with the PSP8 function "maintain indexes". Result - real bad. A mysterious bug breaks the 8-bit warping background every now and then, but it seems that I can fix the problem every time it occurs. Annoying it is of course. This happens when I save the source image file .pcx.

I also made towers for layer six wall. They look somewhat good, but I should not let them be just yet. I probably don't have to shade them so that they seem round. Overall the layer six wall disturbs me. I still have to find good ways to make it look more logical and prettier.

My christmas break from my university of applied sciences is ending soon. I hope the tileset progress doesn't get halted because of it. This could be possible, but I now that I finished Jade Empire in a week (yes, I managed to play it simultaneously with the creation of Fortress of Forgotten Souls :P), I have no intention on starting to play some new game and get carried away with it, like GTA: San Andreas kind of did. I have recently acquired Elder Scrolls VI: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition, and starting to play that now could prove a bad decision :)

DDD 35: 8 bit points of interest

35. 4 January 2008

I fixed the palette, and now I at least won the "7 colors too much" notification from the tileset compilation window. To my luck the 8 bit version is now closer to my vision (the one I actually drew!) when compared to the 16 bit color circus! What the heck is going on with this thing?! Anyway, I finished the layer 7 and there shouldn't be anything to be fixed anymore. I dreamt about a background castle, but when I drew one, it didn't look good enough. I feel that when the other tiles in the background are so simple, I can't even create a good looking castle. Maybe some palette tweaking could result in something good but at this point I didn't consider it worth of my time. We'll see if this continues to bother me.

I also noticed, that the warping background looks good with the background stuff I been creating in the last days. In addition the 8 bit warp background doesn't fully work. Maybe fixing that will help with the mysterious 8 bit - 16 bit color problem. Maybe. I don't know what to expect anymore. Now I feel I would make the warp background again from the beginning but with the current palette colors. That is pretty easy job when I get started with it. After that I must concentrate on the last of the last essential tiles and eye candy. I think I need a sloping grassland tiles, so that the grass scenery would not look blocky. There is no possibility to add a sloping sand land. I feel I would not have the space for the ordinary sloping land. Finally I must think about possibility to look through the ground insides, where players can explore sand and gravel. Some empty spots to see through to the graveyard? Anyway, finishing of Dungeon draws close.

DDD 34: Mysterious color problem

34. 3 January 2008

Not so much new in the tileset today, shadows for hills in the layer 7. The rest of the time I tried to fix the mysterious color problem. Check the screenshot for more information on that weirdness. It occurred to me that the strange color tile (positioned 10, 97 in Fortress Of Forgotten Souls) is causing this and I decided to create it anew. I copied the color tile from Twilight Park with Paint Shop Pro 8's maintain indexes -conversion. I probably have to check if all colors in the palette really are in that tile. I'll save that for later moments with more motivation.

DDD 33: Background taking shape

33. 2 January 2008

Background work, the real stuff. The layer 5 trees got shadows and hanging vegetation and by instant the picture for that layer was close to being finished. There can still be something that needs tweaking, but layer 5 is finished after I've done some gravestones to break the 2D-ness of the picture. The tree shadows antialiasing took a long while, so that remains the largest effort to Dungeon that I made today.

I also tested how the castle wall in layer 6 should look like. I made four different variations, but nothing seemed to look good and fitting. For now I decided that the wall should be of clean color with only texturing in some places like the 28th development screenshot shows.

I did a few tricks to layer 7 material. It is now eight tiles wide and some distant trees and stones were made. Even though not finished, the background layers look good together already. Ditching the old graveyard was a right decision. I have a really good feeling about the progress of Dungeon and there should not be a long time until the tileset release. Personal matters could still interfere with this, but I hope not. For your knowledge, there is one particular girl who is responsible for Dungeon release delayment for even two months :D

DDD 32: Introducing new graveyard

32. 31 December 2007

This year's last Dungeon modification contains making of layer 5 content. I started to make it as its own creation, but soon I realized I could use some of the old gravestones and such in this new edition. I am highly satisfied with noticing this, as I could add the crying angel back to the tileset. The new graveyard looks good, even though it is not finished. I have to shadow the trees better than I did before, and I should look can I get some leaves hanging from the trees. Additionally there has to be stones of different sizes everywhere so that the whole picture would not look like a flat painting (which it is of course :) This new graveyard is also more efficient (less green, more stuff) and contributes more to the Dungeon atmosphere and to the background idea which I am planning. The old one had too distant trees to put together with the great wall.

As a real surprise I noticed that I am not satisfied with the background grass green shade. It puzzles me as I just a while ago edited the color of this background to a better one. From the old screenshots I can see, that I changed the shade, but now this change seems to have reverted itself. The differentiation is visible when when one changes the colors to 8 bit mode. The background grass looks much better then. I must start modifying the palette, no one plays Jazz Jackrabbit 2 with 8 bit colours anymore.

28 May 2008 note: this diary entry introduces for the first time the Fortress of Forgotten Souls unfinished background structure with the castle walls in layer 6. Ultimately I abandoned this design because of I couldn't make the wall work. It did not look good at any point. Additionally a constant wall in the background wouldn't have done anything good for the big picture of the Fortress tileset as I have all the time planned that players should be allowed to exit the great decaying castles of Fortress of Forgotten Souls. A wall in the background layer would have destroyed that feeling for sure. More notes about the wall will ensue and you will read about the thinking that led to the wall abandonment.

DDD 31: Dirt ground starts to work

31. 30 December 2007

I accidentially made a better hook than I made yesterday. The new circle is now a hook, and the earlier hook got demoted to a generic chain. I added vegetation to come out of the pillars and quickly it started to look good and not many tiles were wasted for that. Now there is more possibilities to mesh sand and grass lands. I will search for more ideas from the concept drawings in the coming days.

In the evening I made some essential mask tiles for the dirt ground and finally the flawed layer 4 foreground bricks were fixed (no annoying lines visible). One big change is that I dumped the current graveyard background picture, which I thought was good, especially the crying angel. It is not good enough and I've been thinking of changing it for a long time. The 26. screenshot shows that I am proceeding with the way of the first concept drawing. Layer 5 with big trees, rocks and tombstones. Layer 6 has a walls of a castle and layer 6 distant trees and maybe that faraway castle :)

I am now satisfied with the dirt ground even when I first thought it was missing something instrumental. Somehow all the puzzle pieces are now in order and the whole thing works. The simple texture is there in a small, but important role. Now I add the eye candy and everything really starts to work for itself!

DDD 30: Chain works

30. 29 December 2007

Chain works. I did a vertical chain for the foreground layers and the big chains endings, if somebody would like to use things like that. The vertical chains must have something more, even though they work even now as eye candy and hook events. I wouldn't like those to be layer 4 stuff, but there is little to be done about that. Maybe some invisible (masked) tiles will fix this.

23 May 2008 note: All those "Dungeon Development Diary Entries" look boring. Good names from now on. I also consider to change the earlier names to different ones.

Dungeon development diary entry 29

29. 28 December 2007

I did no eye candy after all. I noticed I still miss dirt ground essential tiles. So I ended up creating dirt land connections for vines and poles and spikes for grass and sand. I also had to better pillar connectivity with the dirt land. Even though lots of eye candy is yet to be made, the dirt ground works now really fine. Unlike I planned in the concepts, this dirt land doesn't feel like a wilderness between castles. Maybe when I get into the eye candy drawing this feeling will improve. I also thought that it would be idiotic to prevent the players from getting inside the inner dark dirt ground. And now when I have come to this conclusion, it is idiotic for not to create dark dirt ground floor tiles. If I don't do them, the dark dirt ground can be used only in the bottom of levels, and that just won't do.

So there are still some essential tiles to do before the turn shifts to eye candy. Now I really know this all is going to get really crammed up. I fear that I can't sacrifice space for layer 4 trees. They would be cool, but the eternal space issue prevails. What can I do with the layers 5-7 drawings? I see no space for them either :S

In the evening I added some tiles to Dungeon. Now I have the inner dirt ground floor tiles, and it is possible to wander inside the ground (some maskwork and voilá). It looks like it's important to do heavily cornered work in there, otherwise everything looks dull. Maybe some eye candy could improve that section as well. Although I know there can't be vine and pole tiles for the insides, but something has to be added.

Dungeon development diary entry 28

28. 27 December 2007

At last back in the Dungeon creation business. The simplicity of the dirt ground has been bothering me now for a long time, and now it seems that the solution is to add pixels here and there. The result would look like sand. Maybe not the most beautiful one but it seems to work just fine. Next I should be drawing many kinds of props so that the player's attention is in them, not the ground itself.

I added today a possibility to add background dark bricks and pillars to the dirt ground. Right now connecting pillars to dirt ground generates a continuity problem in the pillar bricks. I will see that closer later or not. The problem doesn't bother me that much.

I can't make any more essential or heavily masked tiles for Dungeon anymore. Everything must do something with the eye candy unless I want my remaining space to be wasted. I have left something like 230 tiles of free space and that is way too low in comparison to the amount of eye candy I initially planned to create.

20 May 2008 note: I planned this entry to look into Desert, but I did not have the material I need for that article on my current computer. The Desert and the other tileset entries are back soon enough...

Dungeon development diary entry 26

26. 20 November 2007

Many improvements are made with the dirt ground and now it works pretty seamlessly. I only miss the diagonal grounds, which have to be there before the finishing. Some problems remain. The the dirt ground looks too simple (That reminds me of Islands In The Sapphire Sea but as even more simplified) and the too symmetric placement of stones. The background layer graveyard finally got a better shade of green. Candy Chateau colors, begone!

17 May 2008 note: This entry ends second round of the development of Fortress of Forgotten Souls. The first was a short period in August and this second lasted about a month in October and November. Next time I would continue creating Fortress would be in the end of December. There were real life situations hindering, although nothing unpleasant. Only in the delay of Fortress of Forgotten Souls. This blog of course returns before one month is passed :)

Dungeon development diary entry 25

25. 19 November 2007

Amusingly, my good feelings turned fast to negative feelings. The first dirt ground lawns looked pretty when I first made them, but the next three started to look very repetitive. Luckily my problem gets fixed when I change the places of stones on the lawn. So far I have only the basic land and decision must be made how extensive will the dirt ground theme be. And once again, I start to think about the space issues. This is quite the roller coaster!

The screenshot today shows crudely how I plan to proceed with my tileset. First will come the dirt walls, and I have to think, will I add dirt ceilings. Oh darn, there must be ceilings. But when all the utmost necessary tiles are done, I must concentrate on eye candy and the background layer stuff. Quite surprisingly at that point I have a finished tileset!

P.S.: Phew, I already forgot the sand land :S What will I do with that, I would very much like to add it to Dungeon...

Dungeon development diary entry 24

24. 18th November 2007

Not much progress for today, but the little that was done was real important. The previous candy land ground I starting to shape up with a way that fits the tileset perfectly. At this point I couldn't figure out a texture for the inside ground but that I can worry later (yeah, really WORRY, because the Twilight Park texture took a huge amount of space). Right now I hide the single colouredness with skillful application of rocks and roots. Looks like I am influenced of the magnificent Swamp of the Sleeping Jaguar and my dear own Islands in the Sapphire Sea :)

Today I didn't worry so much about the space problems. Especially if I keep the outdoor tiles in order and won't let them grow too many, there should not be any problems! I am doing really fine now and it feels good to continue from this point forward knowing that I am doing a whole lot of good work.

Dungeon development diary entry 23

23. 17th November 2007

I had the joy of creating eye candy today. The pillars I have in the tileset got now additional broken versions to make the feeling of an old place more believable. Also the diagonal chain for foreground layers was done and that ended up looking way better I had imagined in my plans. There is also a vegetated version but that still needs some tuning. As the third thing for today the dirt ground is now clearly darker, and now it fits with everything else in Dungeon, and doesn't look like you've jumped from Apogee's Monster Bash to Mr. Dark's Candy Chateau :)

Dungeon development diary entry 22

22. 16th November 2007

Howdy folks. This day's work included a lot of routine work with adding pole tiles to the Dungeon. Shocking or not, this was completed with copying the Twilight Park poles and changing the colors. The dumb wooden signs were changed to metallic or stoney, whatever one wants to think.

The concern about space is now even more increased. I am pretty sure that I do not have the space for everything I am planning for Dungeon. Actually I am 100 per cent sure, but there are things easier to forget than others. The question is, what to lose.

This day marks the day of first experiment with the dirt ground. Right now it is way too bright and its green grass is very much too green, like that of Sonic the Hedgehog. This leads me to change the 32 greens I have stored in Dungeon palette to more darker of grayish. Speaking of space troubles, I don't have the space to make the outeriors as detailed as I would like to. But let's wait and see how this turns out. Maybe it will not matter in the end. The whole idea of the dirt ground is to offer pauses from the dark insides of the Dungeon. I could probably achieve a atmosphere in which the player feels of going from a castle to another. That would be enough.

Dungeon development diary entry 20

20. 10th November 2007

Today and yesterday the tiles for event 'vine' were created (for some reason I did not make a diary entry yesterday). They are chains and I am thinking of using the same chain theme for a vertical version and to foreground eyecandy as well. I am again pondering the 1010 tile limit I am having with Dungeon. This starts to affect everything I am doing with the source picture (I have always used pcx format (Zsoft Paintbrush) in this phase, by the way). How do I fit all the planned tiles in this small space. The outside areas! Eyecandy! The tileset's going to be stuffed!

Anyway, the vine chains work well. I created also the first iterations of spikes. I feel unsatisfied with them, because they are nowhere near the creativeness of like Twilight Park's spikes (The sharp gardening equipment). These probably will stay the same till the release, but for the wider ground I'll make larger spikes. Maybe swords sticking out of the bricks? Or while I'm at it, I could design some Prince of Persia influenced long, nasty looking spikes. Yeah, that must be the way. I could put a skull hanging in a spike, aloso. Yeah, that sounds cool :)

15th April 2008 note: I feel sorry for not making the hanging skull idea reality. However, in the final release there are no signs of anything that would be like remains of people, and for that reason the lonely skull would not probably have fitted the tileset that greatly.