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 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 19

19. 8th November 2007

The progress today was small. I started to create destruct sceneries with ambition, but the start with copying the old blocks from Twilight Park and changing colors produced way too bright tiles. I have to darken these or make completely new ones. Now I wont, I lost all the will for now. The Blade signature tiles were done today. Some problems with that also, let me explain. At the moment Blade text sits on dark brick background making the text somewhat obscure. Otherwise this looks nice, and it could make it to the final release.

At first I thought that I would be leaving warp background out of Dungeon, but today I made a quick warp background experiment. With the current palette the warp background looks very raw with its colors, but the feeling I wanted it to have is present. I think that this new magenta background not only increases the desolateness and melancholic feelings of the tileset but brings long awaited color to the very gray mix. I have now decided to include this in the final release of Dungeon. I must admit there is some pressure of me putting warp background in my tilesets. For example people didn't seem to like the fact the Islands in the Sapphire Sea didn't have warping background. One problem remains. This magenta color is almost exactly like to one in Medivo2.

Dungeon development diary 1-2

Hello posse!

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

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

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

1. 4th July 2007

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

2. 14th August 2007

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

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

Tileset 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.