I have been planning an adventure game for so long now, yet I can`t really make proper decisions. My earlier projects teached me to set myself relatively little goals and better not think too big or too long about my projects.
However, right now I thought about using photos as backgrounds for my game. They are fast to make, but I wonder if they wouldn`t appear a little cheap - especially since I am going for a more cartoony style for the characters. Setting-wise, my games go in a very similiar direction as Kings Quest, with many fairytalish forests and fantasy landscapes to explore.
My earlier projects (around 2008) looked like this and had a huge amount of cartoon-styled animations:
(http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/6179/pic1ts.png)
My main character is a cat with a hat (the one Graham from KQ wears) and still looks like this:
(http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2011/078/7/a/who_said_furry_by_mspaintr0cks-d3bwpdd.png)
(The furry thing at the bottom is a reference to that horrible horrible internet fandom that likes erotic pictures of animal cartoon characters. My character here pretty much carries two chainguns on his arms, ready to blast the one who calls him a furry - in case you don`t get it ;D )
But, even if those backgrounds look simple, together with the animations they took by far the longest time at this ambitious project. With photos, this process would be unnecessary and the whole game making process would speed up. And as I already said, the problem with the clashing styles will appear.
So, just for trying it out, I made this little experiment using that (actually not very pretty ;D) sketch from the page above:
http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/3271/pic2jb.png
And I don`t really know what to think of that (aside from noticing that the character needs some shadow at his feet). I actually kinda like how the character in all its black and white glory contrasts with the surrounding. I think it almost has some kind of charme to it. If I animate him nicely and let the scenery cast shadows on him at the right places, it would look kinda nice.
It would be very awesome if you guys here could give me some advice on this. :D
Or, do you know any other games where something similiar was pulled off right?
Two things:
1) I don't like photos in AGS games. Not at all.
2) Your hand drawn backgrounds look cool! Of course they take longer, but they are original and personal.
The "Raiders of the Lost Ark" thread shows some great examples of how you base your backgrounds on photos and still come up with a believable Fate Of Atlantis style. I really like that.
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=42327.0
Quote from: cianty on Mon 28/03/2011 21:09:38
Two things:
1) I don't like photos in AGS games. Not at all.
2) Your hand drawn backgrounds look cool! Of course they take longer, but they are original and personal.
The "Raiders of the Lost Ark" thread shows some great examples of how you base your backgrounds on photos and still come up with a believable Fate Of Atlantis style. I really like that.
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=42327.0
Thanks for the comment and the link. I am going to check that out. :D
My bigges problem is my motivation that starts to vanish very fast as soon as the work gets too much. And thats pretty much my problem - I love being able to explore in adventure games, and exploration means that I have to use a few more backgrounds than other adventures. And drawing every single background is already too much work to maintain my motivation. /:
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Yes, unless you know what you're doing. The characters have to exist in the same world as the backgrounds. A lot of games that use photo-backgrounds also tone the backgrounds so that they look like the character exists in that space, and modify them by painting over them. It's a heck of a lot of work.
With your character, photo backgrounds would look cheap, bring the player out of the game, and the exploration aspect would suck, because they're just a whole load of photographs.
I suggest going the opposite direction. Instead of having lots of really detailed backgrounds, take a note from Otto Mesmer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOtd2nCiHLE&feature=related
Felix the cat has a lot of nice animation, and it's backgrounds are very, very, very simple. So long as you have a nice composition, it shouldn't matter how much detail is in them. Got a forest? Copy Simon the Sorcerer - create a bunch of tree sprites and lay them out in a differing manner so that it looks like the backgrounds are more detailed than they are. StS made a lot of backgrounds out of a lot less, with unique backgrounds pieces just for landmarks so you didn't get lost. (and to show off their prettiness)
And don't forget you can reuse stuff, and simplify stuff just for placeholders. Have an idea for a nice background, but don't have the time to make it? Just dab on the sketch with a bit of colour, and stick it in your game until you're perfectly happy with it being there. Then you'll have the motivation to complete that background, since it's already in the game. Just add sketches into your game's alpha. The polishing can come later, once the game's elements have been tied down and you're sprinting the last mile with the finish line in sight.
Well, photos as backgrounds give plenty of rooms fast, but they are usually not really fun to explore, without any fancy objects, contraptions, and animations.
If you put pixel art things over the background, it looks bad (I remember a demo of such a thing on the Amiga back in the days... photos of some woods and islands and stuff, and then one pixeled chest or something on it, so that you knew directly that this was the only thing in the whole room that you could interact with), and if you put hospots over tiny elements of the photo, it gets kind of a pixel hunt, because the objects aren't easily perceptable as proper objects you can interact with. And you have a problem if you change things that are part of the photo, either you have to have good editing skills, or make a photo for every situation...
But I know the motivation problem only too well. :-\
If you're good and fast at drawing on paper, maybe handdrawn backgrounds are an option?
When you have artistic talent, why waste it!
I would certainly choose to play games that show to me there has been some effort into the backgrounds, whether they are hand drawn, whether someone has taken the time to render 3D stuff - in fact, I'd even consider a photo game if whoever is using them in it has made some kind of effort, for example, dressed the 'set' of whatever they're photographing. Photos of city streets and just taken on the fly aren't great, but if someone has actually taken the effort to work on "mise en scene" like you would with hand drawn or rendered art, I think it's fine.
I'm actually quite partial to photos in a low res, cos in some instances it can make it look like just a beautifully drawn retro background, but other times it can fail miserably.
I agree with the others, your hand drawn art looks great, don't discard it :) You're going to gain players with art that shows time has been taken over it, you'll probably lose players if they see the backgrounds are just photos.
Good luck
I'll have to agree with the others - it usually does look cheap, and it's not much fun to explore photographic backgrounds. They instantly feel uninteractive somehow.
Also, I don't have any fond memories of playing a game with photo-backgrounds.
I think it's possible to pull it off with some original use of collage techniques and good photography skills (and a good SLR-camera), but only if it fits with the game's concept. For example, a game set in the alternative-history world of the early 20th century can make good use of old photographs with the characters seamlessly photoshoped in.
It's more complicated with cartoon characters, though - it'll take some careful designing to create a style that works, escpecially with animation. I love the idea of cartoons with realistic backgrounds, I've even tried it a few times (like here (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5234992/winteryotsuba.jpg) and here (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2159609/scott_fan_guitarheroes.jpg) ), but to do it well will probably take even more effort, than with the cartoony ones. Also, your cartoon backgrounds look great. :)
As for the lack of motivation - everyone suffers from that, you just have to try and be better than us :P
You can't just take a photo and slap it on and be done. It's one thing to just grab a photo and use it as a background, it's another to create something that doesn't exist and make it photo-realistic. You can use the photo as your "plan", but you still have to have some drawing skill. But more than drawing skill you'd need the skill of design, a mastery of form and light, and some perspective skill. But some of that will be of no use because the photo has done something in the creation of itself that creates these kinds of, patterns. You will find that if you want to edit the photo (say you want to extend a wall with some bricks that have light shining on them....) you'll encounter these patterns and be unable to reproduce just the right amount of color-pixel patterns without the use of something like Photoshop's clone tool. It would take you forever to clone it out by hand.
Furthermore on the issue of these weird artifacts and patterns, if you are not using your own photos, but photos from various sources (hopefully free to use) - then you'll end up with all kinds of variation on these artifacts and patterns and trust me, someone will notice it. That's why using photos is a pain in the ass to begin with. You can treat the photos, get rid of the artifacts and repaint over them so that they all appear uniform in a way, but that's time consuming too and requires all those skills I mentioned above. Or you could just slap the photo on and be done with it...but yeah, it's cheap and it's ugly.
Even when using photos you can get good results with skill and time.
This (http://www.monochrom.at/suz-game/sektor2/index_en.htm) is a very good example, and yes, it's an AGS game.
Example of photo realistic graphics done well:
(http://www.forceforgood.co.uk/screenshots/pq32.png)
Example of photo realistic graphics done badly:
(http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/241511-daryl-f-gates-police-quest-open-season-dos-screenshot-probably.png)
I think The Oracle (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=detail&id=735) is a good example of a game with photo backgrounds. But the point is, the game is 1st Person. No characters that don't fit the style and the objects blend amazingly in the background.
I'm sorry but I have to say your combination of photo and drawn charater looks indeed cheap.
A long time ago I did some experimentation with refactored pictures :
(http://img178.imageshack.us/img178/4809/ghola3bymonsieurouxxzu0.jpg) (http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/1385/fond0101yo3.jpg)
Everything you see in the image comes from Google images. everything.. And it's not a single picture, it's tens of them. The original scenes looked nothing like what you see here.
The result looks cheap because at the time I was bad with contrast, and also I stupidly lost quality by stretching down and then up some elements. But I'm sure one can obtain awesome results very quicly.
That production method addresses the main criticisms of pictures-as-backgrounds: You can rework the composition to make the picture fit in the game.
The problem is that people usually use photo backgrounds because they think it's faster, but you'll likely spend a lot of time on a good photo background, almost as much as you would for a good drawn background. Thus many photo backgrounds looks bad.
Plus when drawing a background you can put together stuff exactly as you want, no mucking about with the perspecitve from the original photo nor the difference in resolution and details between different sources. And then there's always the fact that characters don't fit the style of backgrounds and usually have the uncanny valley feel.
Using photos as reference is a completly different thing and can get you better results and faster than drawing from scratch.
My proverbial two-cents: Photo backgrounds can look good in games that use FMV or photorealistic characters. Generally this is extremely hard and laborous to do, and as such my short answer to your question is: "Yes".
Quote from: WHAM on Tue 29/03/2011 10:01:10
Photo backgrounds can look good in games that use FMV or photorealistic characters. Generally this is extremely hard and laborous to do
+1
In King's Quest, when rooms aren't completely useless, they tend to have at best one object to pick up, one puzzle or one character to talk with per room maximum, try not to do the same. Sometimes it's better to have ten or fifteen important rooms that have lot of interactions than thirty rooms that are largely useless. Unless your game feature an exotic world that requires a lot of scenery porn/gorn to give the player a certain impression, try to get rid of rooms that are mostly useless or combine them with other similar rooms to minimize your workload.
I get it you like exploration in adventure games, but like some pointed, I doubt exploring photo backgrounds will be much fun unless you put a whole lot of effort in them, and you risk losing players with your art choice, so for what it's worth in the long run, it might be better to reduce exploration.
Give this a thought before you switch to photo backgrounds, because you obviously have a lot of talent when it comes to animation and background, and it'd be a shame not to use it.
Quote from: cosmicr on Tue 29/03/2011 05:16:41
Example of photo realistic graphics done well:
Example of photo realistic graphics done badly:
I disagree with this assessment. I think the photo-realistic portions of PQ3 were completely awful and partly ruined that series. At least for me they did...I expected the game to have painted portraits, but instead got photo cut-outs with weird artifacts in them. Those portions where you'd see a photo seemed like something of an artistic cop-out to me, to make those portions feel grittier, or a bit more "real". But instead it seemed like a bad joke.
Police Quest 4 on the other hand at least attempted to make it the whole style and not merge them...which I might have liked, only the resolution distorted and ruined the photo quality and made it look as bad as PQ3, only all the time. Had they done a photo-realistic game in higher resolution today, it might not be so bad. You can't half-ass a photo game, that's for sure.
Quote from: Ilyich on Mon 28/03/2011 22:56:24
I think it's possible to pull it off with some original use of collage techniques and good photography skills (and a good SLR-camera), but only if it fits with the game's concept. For example, a game set in the alternative-history world of the early 20th century can make good use of old photographs with the characters seamlessly photoshoped in.
This is, indeed, very similar to my setup. However, I am using Photoshop filters to add a surreal quality and make them less realistic. Comments appreciated.
(http://www.blogityourself.org/courtyard2.gif)
Quote from: cat on Tue 29/03/2011 09:21:44
I think The Oracle (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=detail&id=735) is a good example of a game with photo backgrounds. But the point is, the game is 1st Person. No characters that don't fit the style and the objects blend amazingly in the background.
Indeed, The Oracle was brilliantly done.
@MMMorshew - I've often been tempted by using photos simply because I can not draw to save my life. For my game I'm using something in between - drawing the backgrounds myself with black outlines and then filling in the colours and texture using photos from Google. It still looks cheap though, so I wouldn't recommend this method or straight photos if you can draw backgrounds like the ones above.
If drawing rooms from scratch is too cumbersome for you, one method that seems to work brilliantly for some people (even some people on this forum) is to prototype your room quickly in 3D with something like Google Sketchup (downloading free models and such) and then render it either as lines or with some kind of filter that makes it look hand-drawn. At that point you can either color it in entirely from scratch or render basic colors and add the rest of the details yourself. It's something I've been wanting to try out myself for awhile so I thought I would mention it as a possibility. Aside from the relatively high saturation of your colors, I think your backgrounds look pretty good.
Quote from: Monsieur OUXX on Tue 29/03/2011 09:33:04
A long time ago I did some experimentation with refactored pictures :
(http://img178.imageshack.us/img178/4809/ghola3bymonsieurouxxzu0.jpg) (http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/1385/fond0101yo3.jpg)
Everything you see in the image comes from Google images. everything.. And it's not a single picture, it's tens of them. The original scenes looked nothing like what you see here.
The result looks cheap because at the time I was bad with contrast, and also I stupidly lost quality by stretching down and then up some elements. But I'm sure one can obtain awesome results very quicly.
That production method addresses the main criticisms of pictures-as-backgrounds: You can rework the composition to make the picture fit in the game.
I love the style of those, that first one especially. Care to talk more about the process? Did you draw a basic layout and then put pictures over them? I really like it and would play a game that looked like that. doesn't look cheap at all. With the grain it almost looks scanned in.
We all realize that this is a thread from 2011 and MMMorshew hasn't been active on the forum for almost a year, right?
Oh wow, sorry.
Damn you, rhyme! I want my 2 cents back :(
Quote from: Snarky on Sat 06/04/2013 10:10:34
We all realize that this is a thread from 2011 and MMMorshew hasn't been active on the forum for almost a year, right?
Sorry, that was my fault. I'm just getting started on a game (& new to AGS) and was facing the same question so I posted a sample background image of mine in a reply. Looks like everyone was replying to the original post though. Here's another one:
(http://www.blogityourself.org/courtyard5.gif)
I really like the style - you can still see it used to be a photo, but it certainly doesn't look cheap! Disadvantage of this style is that it would be really hard to add characters, at least I think so.
Quote from: .M.M. on Mon 08/04/2013 22:37:23
I really like the style - you can still see it used to be a photo, but it certainly doesn't look cheap! Disadvantage of this style is that it would be really hard to add characters, at least I think so.
Thanks for the feedback. We're planning on making it 1st person at this point so shouldn't be an issue.
Quote from: rhyme on Mon 08/04/2013 22:41:42Thanks for the feedback. We're planning on making it 1st person at this point so shouldn't be an issue.
Unless there's any other character in the game...
I'm not too fond of this style. To me it looks like "was too lazy to make proper backgrounds so I took stock photos from the internet and applied a filter to make it look cool".
Yes, it looks extremely cheap. If you want to use photographs, either
a) Make the whole game 100% photography based, and take original photos yourself, like they did with Donna. The photographs need to be aesthetically appealing, and fit the game perfectly.
b) Use the photos as references, but paint your own picture from scratch. Don't trace, don't use cheap filters, just look at it while painting your own thing. It both looks better and improves your skills.
I agree with the two posters above: either use photos for reference or make dedicated photos (and for that you need to be a gifted photographer).
But if you have the skills a "photo collage" method as shown by Monsieur OUXX can yield amazing results, I think.
I don't know. If used knowingly, the jarring style between cartoony characters and photo backgrounds can work. Any of you seen the cartoon "Amazing world of gumball"?
Quote from: Andail on Tue 09/04/2013 09:56:22
Yes, it looks extremely cheap. If you want to use photographs, either
a) Make the whole game 100% photography based, and take original photos yourself, like they did with Donna. The photographs need to be aesthetically appealing, and fit the game perfectly.
b) Use the photos as references, but paint your own picture from scratch. Don't trace, don't use cheap filters, just look at it while painting your own thing. It both looks better and improves your skills.
Thanks for the feedback. FYI, these are all my original photos taken myself and yes it will be 100% photography based.
I'd love to see an adventure game where someone build real mini replicas of rooms and photographs them really well and also animates some handmade puppets. Kind of like samorost but with no paintovers and more interactions.
You mean like this for example? http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1330/ (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1330/)
cool, will give this a try, thanks cat :)
Also The Dream Machine (http://www.thedreammachine.se/).
Have a look at these links:
Real Bits 1 (http://www.behance.net/gallery/Real-Bits-video-games-in-real-life/8028611)
Real Bits 2 (http://www.behance.net/gallery/Real-Bits-2-video-games-in-real-life/8068249)
These aren't games, but a series of still images. While it's obvious that you're looking at sprites on photos, I think it's done well and none of the pixel art looks particularly out of place. Granted, some of these images are using editing techniques and almost all include a pretty nice shadow, but I still think the point remains.
It will only look as cheap as your photos and sprites, in my opinion.