Adventure Game Studio

Hey all!

I just pseudo-finished a new section of my website and I figured it would be fun to get some response on the stuff, hence I'm making a bit of a mirror here of my "sketches and thoughts" page. Also as a bonus goodie I'll throw in some deleted scenes here for you to mock and laugh at. Primarily I removed them from the game since I didn't need them. But had they looked better I might have tried harder at keeping them in the game I guess. I think it's probably good for people to see that behind every good looking backdrop there's a million ones that didn't turn out as nice. Brute force does the trick!


I hope someone enjoyed this, I sure had a good time going through my sketches and reflecting about them for a while!

Wow, sweet stuff. Really nice to see design and thought processes behind parts of the game.

I really like how you are releasing all this stuff. For an AGS newcomer in awe of your game, I'm sure it's really useful. It really shows that the game making process isn't simple and flawless for anyone...

nice stuff! I hope it will encourage more indie devs to show us what happened behind the scenes!

Very very interesting.

Quote from: bicilotti on Mon 23/08/2010 23:59:32
nice stuff! I hope it will encourage more indie devs to show us what happened behind the scenes!

I only have h2g2 old sketches and those are tooo embarrassing to show. :D

Nice stuff! Thanks for sharing!

Seeing that aquarium animated would definately be a mind blower...

Nice thread!

To be honest, I was kinda disappointed you cut the yacht landing pad from the final game - I remember seeing it in an early build and it was a shot I was pretty fond of style wise.

Still, it makes sense when you explain why you took it out, so fair enough.

Glad y'all enjoy looking at this stuff! I've got more sketches and all sorts of work in progress stuff I can post if anyone is interested.

markbilly: yeah I really want people to understand that making art isn't about magic, it's about loads and loads of hard work. If you are willing to spend many hours on your art, it will pay off. I hope someone learns from this and makes an effort instead of just shrugging their shoulders and saying "I'm no artist".

Ben304: hehe sadly I've had to remove quite a lot of things I have liked. It hurts but in the long run such decisions tend to turn out to be the right ones.

Beautiful stuff, theo. I'm in awe of your sense of style in lighting, color scheme and overall atmosphere. You've really inspired me in terms of technique, and you couldn't have posted the tutorial and sketches at a better time, as I'm in the middle of transitioning from digitally colored pencil drawings to using a tablet for all stages of my backgrounds. Cheers.

love it. that's all I can say at the moment.

Your bit about the importance of thumbnails got me really thinking, and it'd be really awesome to see a bunch of thumbnails you may have for a background that ended up in the game. I always find composition to be my biggest weakness in background attempts, especially on really interesting backgrounds. Maybe one you had the most trouble with, if you don't mind my request...?

I just think this thread is great, and that this might add to the tremendous help you've been sharing.

Thanks for this though. Great art!

garagegothic: Glad it hit the spot!

mouthuvmine: Here, have a look on top, I have updated with some thumbnails. I couldn't find a good enough collection of them for any of the scenes that I finished for chapter one, so here's a sneak peek from chapter two instead where I now have millions of thumbnails! The room covered here went through a lot of different angles before I settled in a final design.

That's pretty awesome! Thanks a bunch. It's just cool to me to see how a particular scene came about.

That's one the best advices! (The greyscale one). And I gave it a try, and damn it works!! :D I always had trouble with that aspect! So thanks a bunch, theo.

Glad you like the method Dualnames! It's great if you feel you want to focus on composition. Which I often do.

I just posted an article on hardydev that people who enjoyed might find interesting, check it out here:
http://hardydev.com/2010/09/11/the-journey-down-background-art/

What did you mean by "I like to render my scene's in grey scale" does that mean like you model all of the backgrounds? By rendering them? ???

The word "render (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/render)" is not used solely for 3-D polycrap scenes. It's just because 3-D tech. used the word too often that makes people misinterpret the meaning.

I've seen many people who would paint a picture in grayscale first and then add colour to it by adding a colourise or additive (or whatever it's provided/called by the software) layer on top of it.

this might be an interesting topic to follow:

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=76738

Hey, speaking of removed scenes, when I beta tested your game, once I used room change debug function to jump around the game, and stumbled on a scene with the animated lighthouse. Was that supposed to be another scene from part 1, or some future part of the game, or just an experiment?

Great article! Thanks for more excellent advice, theo. The parts about scaling and depth were particularly interesting for me, as part of what I'm trying at the moment is to break away from the traditional "theater stage" approach towards a more cinematic style of composition and editing (e.g. use close-up shots for dialogs or interacting with items/characters in the foreground).

One thing I'm still curious about: How do you approach the animated light effects? Do you use dodge/burn tools on the grayscale layer, or do you redraw parts of it? I suppose you must also change the color layer if the light has a different hue? I'm so impressed how you manage those smooth transitions without losing the painterly look to the shadows.

Crimson Wizard: That was an animation test for chapter two:) I have remade it now in 640 x 480. It looks awesome.

GarageGothic: I never animate anything in grayscale. I always do that stuff after having colored the whole piece. For better or for worse:)

Hey, thanx a lot for the insight into your workflow! It was very enlightening, especially how you like to do a greyscale pass first=)