Hello friends,

I have been meticulously toiling away with my new JJ2 tileset "Rainbow Runner" since the beginning of January and I am finally able to share a sneak peek of it with everyone.

Rainbow Runner is a tileset of splashing colors, happiness and abrupt quirkiness. In this tileset, Jazz, Spaz, and Lori will find themselves in an environment of dreamy pastel colors, running around on undulating rainbow highways while stumbling upon more eccentric stuff such as unicorns and balloons which, for some reason, keep foreground clouds airborne. At the core, Rainbow Runner consists of three environments, which can of course be mixed together in all sorts of ways. These environments are the clouds (heavily Rayman 1 inspired), the rainbows, and the bluish ground realm. All of them will have a massive amount of tiles for your perusal.

Rainbow Runner has by far the most animated tiles I have ever had in a tileset of mine. It will have all sorts of eyecandy animations (the crown jewel being a running unicorn with the dimensions of 7x4 tiles), but also more practical ones such as disappearing platforms and necessity animations for conveyor belts and warp events. In fact, a cornerstone of Rainbow Runner development has been the fact that most or all gameplay modifiers and environment objects will be supported alongside with some palette events (I will be focusing on the pinball events).

In the beginning, I envisioned Rainbow Runner as a tileset for making race levels. Keeping in line with that vision, I will ship Rainbow Runner on Jazz2Online with at least one race level. That will be a new one for me, for sure

Rainbow Runner has seen all sorts of development branches during these three months and I have already abandoned quite a bit of nice art as I ultimately deemed them incompatible with my vision. Additionally, I made this process needlessly complicated for myself with genius moves like sketching a plan for the tileset after a month of tileset development and not planning on any sort of color budget. Anticipating a complicated drawing process, I have actually maintained a version history of sorts for the tileset. I have a j2l's and j2t's for all development days of this tileset and if you, my JJ2 friends, have interest for it, it will be very easy to share the entire cavalcade of development levels and tilesets with you on J2O.

I am aiming to release Rainbow Runner at Jazz2Online by the end of May, but I am not completely confident about that timeframe yet. A lot of drawing still needs to be done, such as nearly all of the eye candy tiles.

So, without further rambling, I am pleased to share a work-in-progress screenshot of "Rainbow Runner" with you:



I will be glad to answer any questions you might have regarding the tileset.

Have a great weekend everyone,
Cheers, Blade

This looks so cool!

I love the cloud tiles, and how they are inspired by Rayman... it is such a great game.

Band Land meets Rainbow Road! Nice to see you're still interested in drawing tilesets. It looks like this'll be one of your more gimmicky sets yet, such a diversion from Aztec 2 but I'll enjoy it nevertheless.

I'm digging the big fat hamster tubes, and the alternate colors of grass! There are parts that feel very satisfyingly old-school, like a Waz set or something, but the clouds and birds really set it apart from everything else.