Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

The Fortress of Forgotten Souls
-------------------------------
A Jazz Jackrabbit 2 tileset by Blade




Release notes:

Hello all, it's time for yet another Blade tileset, this is the 13th one.
This
time we are invited to a dark and gloomy fortress somewhere in the eerie
and
ghastly countryside of some distant country. It is splitted in two
different
regions, which are the actual fortress and its surroundings, scattered with
leafless trees and ancient stone. The fortress looks a lot like that in the
old
Prince of Persia 1. The resemblance is almost a full accident. The fortress
part consists lots, lots of bricks, different kind of pillars, sloping
walking
paths, lots chains, vegetation and of course spikes, poles and vines.

Lots can be built alone with the fortress part, but the tileset becomes a
complete
one only with the grass surroundings part. This is mostly eye candy as all
the
trees, rocks and gravestones are located in this section. Most of the eye
candy
can be successfully attached to the fortress part. This makes Fortress of
Forgotten
Souls more versatile tileset to work with.

Lots of background solutions are introduced. For layer 8 one can choose a
warp
background or a calm night with sky full of (animated) stars. Rain can be
added, 
and lots of work can be done with layers 5-7. Blade encourages everyone to
experiment with Fortress! :)

Fortress of Forgotten Souls is a one year project. It all started as an
idea
in December 2006, but went to the production phase as late as August 2007.
About
a week ago from this point the tileset was officially finished, but some
bugs
were fixed after that. I am sorry about the not completely working palette.
Like
before, the palette handling is not my area of expertise, and for example
water
in 8-bit color mode will not look as good as it could look.

Many will not see Fortress of Forgotten Souls so easy-to-use tileset. Of
course
that is my fault, but at this point little can be done. For your
convenience
there is a jpg-picture included in the zip-package to show some points of
interest.
With that picture and the example level many of the tileset's secrets can
be
revealed.

Even though Fortress of Forgotten Souls is now released, the Blade Blog
"Strange
Tales of Blade" continues with the Fortress development entries. I still
have
about two dozens of entries to translate, so check out
(http://blade-of-finland.
blogspot.com) regularly!





.zip contents

Fortress of Forgotten Souls.j2lThe main example single player level
Fortress of Forgotten Souls 2.j2lThe same, but with different background
Fortress.j2tThe tileset
useful_to_know.jpgPoints of interest
Fortress of Forgotten Souls.txtThis file
darkforest.xm"The Dark Forest" by Janne Peltola




What next?

Well, who knows. During the making of the example level I realized that
I don't like the level building so much anymore. This means that if there
is a future release of Blade, that is a tileset. I am a slow tileset maker
and can't promise the next one to come, but pretty surely that day will
eventually come. I can say something about the next tileset I could create:
"Lost Valley". More of this later in the "Strange Tales of Blade" blog!




The Fortress of Forgotten Souls, by Sampo "Blade" Vesanen. Developed
between
August 2007 and January 2008. Contact me at (sampo.vesanen@kolumbus.fi).
Also
the old address (svesanen@hotmail.com) still works, but I'd like you to
send
any comments to my Kolumbus address. My web pages 
(http://koti.mbnet.fi/theblade/) are still online, but don't expect many
updates there. I read the guestbook quite often, though. Drop your message
there if you have something to ask.

visit: http://blade-of-finland.blogspot.com

Big props to the Jazz2Online people, I wouldn't make tileset without you
all.