Crimson Twilight by Arkanix Labs

Remember playing Legacy of the Ancients? The Legend of Blacksilver? Questron I & II? Add in a dash of the Ultimas, Demon's Winter, Wrath of Denethenor, and a story line created through twenty plus years of table-top pencil and paper role-playing, and you've got the core of the Crimson Twilight Trilogy.

A non-playable preview was released at ECCC 2009 and can be downloaded here.

Arkanix Labs is working on a new, more playable, preview to be released shortly.

Things are going slowly, partly because our devtools need to mature a bit and the rest can be put straight onto "real life" getting in the way of the hobby our team loves.

Here are a few updates to hold you over until the next preview is released, which should be sometime this summer.


The first player sprite, the final game will have eight to pick from at character creation. Multicolor with hires overlay


A selection of recently completed monster portraits. For an idea of the size of the portraits, they require nine multicolor sprites to display fully on screen.

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We recently reached revision number five for our tomb and town tilesets, using up nearly every character cell of each tileset. Here are a few newer maps made with the new tileset revisions:


The lawless outpost of Jolak, the only port town on the southern continent and the home to one of the darker organizations in the game. Size: 144x128 tiles


The Jolak Underground, the base of operations for the thieves guild. Size: 75x75 tiles


The town of Narkare is a trading stop along the north/south trade route of western Murkasada. This crypt is housed somewhere under the town. Size: 64x64 tiles (the white X are from the map size template)

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We've also had a few very surprising and awesome things happen since the release of our first preview in September 2009.

Originally, the music for the game was going to be composed by one of our own guys, Fuzz. He made up a few test tunes, all of them perfectly fit for the completed game - good stuff. But Fuzz is helping on so many other fronts it really was stretching him thin. Out of the blue we had an offer from some well known composers to make the entire album for the game! The composers are Jeff/Crest, Linus/Crest, and Aumtron/FunkScientist Productions. Of course we accepted! The talent of those three is outstanding and certainly will make the audio part of our game massive and help to push the entire project to higher peaks!

Round the same time an email came in from another talented guy, this time a graphician. Releasing the preview certainly was generating some good buzz for us! The email was from the talented individual Zeldin/Cascade and he was offering to make a loader screen for the game! In fact, he was so interested that he already took an older unused screen and worked on it before emailing! It was already complete and ready to send over on a disk image! Of course, again, we instantly accepted the offer and thanked Markos for his hard work and promised him a copy of the completed game. Markos took a picture originally painted by Mel Grant titled "Sword of the Gael" and pixeled (not wired) it to the C64 some years in the past and it was never used. He added a nicely down Crimson Twilight logo to the left side of the screen and it was complete! Here is a smaller image of the original Mel Grant painting:



That image would be perfect for cover artwork for our box, I'm thinking of contacting Mel Grant again to see if he'd be willing to help out a hobby project with artwork.

Lastly, a recent internal preview with the player sprite in the game marching around the town of Narkare. The screen might look blurry, but that is simply the "PAL emulation" option in WinVICE in action with a Pepto palette in place.



Well, I hope that is a big enough update to cover your interest for the time until the next preview is released. We're currently scheduled to release the next preview in July, but that date might slip back to August due to some recent medical issues on my part. I'm ready to get back to the code now and look forward to releasing something soon.

Please post any and all feedback - positive or negative - here. Feedback is a really good helper for large projects, especially when you get to certain "climbing the mountain" points that need an extra shot!

BTW - We'll have CartographPC V1.5 shortly and about a month later V2.0 should be shot out. After that the Cartograph tools are mainly finished and we can all get focused back on finishing this chapter of Crimson Twilight - Forgotten Chamber of the Seers!

A smaller update than the previous, but we're in the middle of working on the next preview to be released.

This time around we'll show you an assortment of monsters you'll encounter during your travels in Murkasada. All of these sprites are composed of one multicolor sprite and a hires sprite overlay to bring out more details. The colors displayed aren't the final choices, these are just work-in-progress screenshots.

This first batch was created by our graphician Andy Vaisey.


ghost / haunt / skeletal phantom


lich - not someone you want to meet up with in a dark alley


mummy - best friends with the lich and certainly not yours


giant snake - ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss


giant rat - someone flushed it down the toilet and now it is back!


yeti - everyones favorite snowman


sasquatch - walking through the forest? better watch your back!

The final three sprites in this preview are the work of Saehn/Style.


beholder - the eyes, the eyes!


bugbear - will this big teddy bear hug you or flatten you?


ankheg - a very large bug that bites people into pieces, beware

Next month we'll have a little something different to check out, stay tuned.