My background: The Cafe

[Totoro]

OK,
I decided to listen what DG and Vel and other people tell me and I am drawing the backgrounds for my next game by myself. It looks crappy of course...  
So what do you think? I am happy about the tables in the back, although someone told me the perspective is not 100% correct, but I am not happy about the tables in the front and I would like to add some chairs, but grrrrrr... I cannot draw chairs! Even when I look at photos of chairs. DO you know Ikea? I have been looking at Ikea chairs the whole day, but still I cannot manage to add a few chairs to my Cafe-Background.

So what do you think? Any advice is welcome.
But don't tell me I should use stolen backgrounds in my next game too  

[TheYak]

I'll start off by saying it's a good image.. don't stress about that part.  There's also no need to get totally caught-up in perspective difficulties.  The largest perspective problem in this picture is the door in the upper-left.  Its visible hallway ought to be on the left side, with the door on the right (So just mirrored if you can manage to fit that in).  The tables in the back look alright but they also look paper-thin at the moment.  Give 'em a bit of an edge, maybe a few pixels thick and they'll look a lot more realistic.  The table-stands could also stand to be a tad more circular, especially in the foreground banquet tables.  

I think what you did with the lights is wonderful.  Adds a touch of atmosphere to the scene.  The modern-art picture would add a little to the scene, but I feel the yellow "scribble" is a bit too thin and makes it stand out as an MS PAint type drawing.. perhaps some thickening in spots so it looked more like a paint-brush swoop.    

Nice image though.  Don't be shy about sharing art.  Whatever you make, the majority of us have seen a hell of a lot worse.

Made a small edit (hope you don't mind).  The only fix that looks a lot better is the door.. the others only show what I mean with a quick paint-over.  Rounded out the vases, made art "blobbier" & rounded out table-stands.  Of course, taking time to do properly, it would help more.  One other note, I hope you keep a copy in .bmp format or low .jpeg compression.. those artifacts are evil.

[InCreator]

Well, getting right perspective isn't that difficult. By the looks of the cafe I assume It's done in MSPaint. But when you use a painting program that supports layers like PhotoShop or Artgem(see my tutorial on resources page), you can use my technique - draw some kind of grid matrix and use it as a reference to keep track of right perspective. Like this:

I drew it fast so It isn't 100% correct, but such thing helps a lot if you know how to use it.
With such helper, room edges, table edges and everything else can be done much more accurately.
Now look at the closest table to the image bottom and imagine its leftmost edge aligned with grid. Get my point?

[TheYak]

I dunno..perspective isn't a rule written in stone as far as backgrounds go.  Sure, it makes the drawing look more correct, but I sorta like the 30 and 60 degree angles to everything.  It's kind of a pseudo-isometric design of sorts.  Another way to do perspective, even when using a crappy program like paint is to have your center point (or points) in a bright color you can easily remove and then use the line tool to angle stuff in the right direction.  You can extend it all the way and remove the extras, or you can extend it and keep in mind what angle the line should be at.

[InCreator]

Well, it depends much of style, too. Just when we get over these MSPaint backgrounds, things are going to get better. Just too many games look excactly the same right now. And this is kinda boring.
But saying that gfx doesn't matter in adventure games... i don't believe it. Making games is supposed to be difficult. Now, If I don't have to draw - I'd make 10 games per day. Nothing difficult in converting ideas into a story.

AGS gives possibility to do that easily and if we'd ask: dear AGSers - you're currently doing a game - what's missing yet? 90% people says: Graphics, animations, GUI/cursor design. So gfx is the "work" here, everything else is more like things WE CAN do, except maybe some (crazy?) ideas that require advanced scripting.