Hi all,
I'm new to ags and the forum and would appreciate any comments/suggestions
you have to offer on my new background (colour, detail, shading etc.).
(http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/beach1.png)
http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/beach1.png
can you possably post it as a gif or png?
I'm having trouble telling the kick ass pixel work from the jpg speckles :P
but from what I can seen i love it
that's a very nice background you've managed to make (the jpeg compression kind of messes it up though, try posting a PNG or if it's under 256 colours, a GIF version), the water is very nice, you might want to try adding some more colours to the walkbehind area though, maybe some dark green or blue on the parts that are leaves and grass, nice work.
Excellent beginning here!
I agree with what Boyd said.
Also, the grass on the right side of the screen (to the right of the beach) is blurry. The rest of the image seems to be pixelized but that part looks blurry and it jumped out at me right away!
That could just be because of JPG compression??
But a great start!
dm
thanks for posting the new one
as I said before i really like it
i think you should animate the water tho
Very nice! It reminds me the first Monkey Island... sigh...
Neat! 8) But perhaps a very dark shade of green would be better than pitch black for the shadows in the foreground...?
I think that IS a very dark shade of green actually, but I agree that it could be a little lighter. Otherwise really good work. I especially like the water.
I think its really great!
Very good work, Sim!!!!!!
Something of the best I've ever seen!
Really looks impressive i must say.
why is that large rock in the center giving me the middle finger?
good job!!
shawn :)
That is awesome! Why does it look like the grass has sand on it? Bah, What do I know, That is freaking awesome. Must have taken a while.
hehe, I didn't actually see like that when I drew it but you're right it looks like the middle finger. Anyway, I added some blue to the walk-behind area and added in a few extra touches and it seemed to improve the look quite a bit, in fact looking at it now it could probably
use more blue. Thanks for that.
(http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/beach2.png)
I'm really impressed I love the changes good work
This is one of the best in a long time
Spectacular water effects, man. It's all good.
its great!! i love the water, too. Did you make the pallete from scratch or took it from somewhere?? the water looks very FOA to me (which is good :) )
the only thing that looks a bit strange to me is the transition between sand and the middle finger rock, and the sand and the vegetation (sp?), seems a bit 'drastic', kind of artificial or so, but it might be just me, you know ;)
i hope to see more backgrounds in this style! :)
This transission is the only little thing, which could be made better in this screen!
Go on! Make more "rooms" like this and create a game with this gfx-skillz!
Great! really!
I like it!
wow, looks real perdy, very secluded, maybe a little animation of the waves coming in :D
i am enjoying this greatly
I like your Pic, it's great drawn. i wish i could make pics like this. what i would do, is to make the dark foreground look like plants in green, but very dark green. but most of all i like it :-)
I like this background a lot - good job!
I always wondered - how do you create the dithered look that all the classic adventure games have? Monkey Island, Simon the Sorcerer, Indiana Jones etc.
For a while, I thought this was created in the last step, when it was reduced to 8-Bit color, but I think they are created with a palette right from the start. But then - pixel-pushing until it looks right isn't the way to go either, is it?
I'd be very happy about some hints on how to do this.
Thanks in advance!
thunderstorm, do you have Photoshop, i can't remember
if you do try messing around with setting either the layer to Dissolve or the brush to Dissolve [can do this in PS 7, dunno about others]
i managed to crap this out pretty quick after figuring devising a Plan Of Action ©
(http://sylpher.com/kafka/junk/edits/rock.gif)(http://sylpher.com/kafka/junk/edits/rock.gif)
or if you have photoshop 7 [don't know about earlier version, i know it isn't in 5.5] try choosing the 1 pixel brush and setting it to scatter
i was able to poop this out but i don't think it looks as refined as the first rock... maybe cause i worked a little faster
(http://sylpher.com/kafka/junk/edits/rock2.gif)(http://sylpher.com/kafka/junk/edits/rock2.gif)
Ooh.. That looks pretty. I wouldn't call it dithered, but I suppose you wouldn't want a dither pattern on a rough surface like a rock. I actually think the second one looks better. The transition between light and dark is just more smooth..
ThunderStorm: You could always try Deluxe Paint. That makes things like palette editing and gradients a lot easier. You can't really get away from pixel-pushing, though, if you want the kind of detail games like MI and Simon had.. Simon especially.
Thanks a lot eric, I'll go and see if there's a similar function in GIMP (which I use). The style of your example pic is just what I wanted to achieve.
Ben: I might actually try Deluxe Paint again. Abut pixel-pushing - this is surely the case for characters in low-res and for certain parts of the background, but I can't believe they pushed 36800 pixels for each background (assuming a size of 320x115). Or did they? :-\
Well, Monkey Island 2 were oil painted on large canvases, and then scanned in, I'm not sure how they scanned in something so large. And then, how did they take the scan and make them pixely, just by reduction?
No, i'm sure they didn't pixel-push the entire background. But they probably did for some of the smaller details. Dpaint and similar programs have a lot of nice tools, but they're not perfect. I'm sure they had to zoom in and do a bit of touch-up work before they were done. I've tried to get that look with some of my backgrounds, and the automated stuff like gradients and anti-alias are really helpful, but they can't do everything.
Great background. Love the way the trees are framing it.
I drew the original on paper (sketch), then outlined the rocks, plants and trees
and some other detailing with a black marker. I scanned it in and went to work with the colours, experimenting until I was happy with the basic pallette. To smooth it over I used the airbrush tool in paint shop pro, lowering the hardness and opacity to get a nice blending effect, and performed quick dashes across the areas that needed it.