Spot the Difference

[Stupot]

Hey guys and gals.
I just been playing around with photoshop, after a long absence and decided to make a spot-the-difference puzzle.

There's two reasons for this thread, really:
a) For crits (hence posting it here) -  How can I improve my technique to make some of the changes look more natural?
b) For ideas -  I'm thinking of compiling a bunch of say 15-20 of these into a playable .exe using AGS, but I need some ideas, perhaps a theme... I'm sure you'd all prefer to play it if the pictures were a bit more exciting than generic market place stockphotos

Feel free to play along aswell as giving me crits, but if you do, please put your answers in spoiler tags.

Unfortunately photobucket shrunk the final image so it's about half the size it should have been, but all the differences are still noticeable if you're looking in the right places.

There are ten differences overall.

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f349/Captain_Stu/AGS/Market.png
(original image courtesy of FreeFoto.com)

[BOYD1981]

when i made my first small Spot the Difference 'game' i chose to trace over the image instead of using the photo and then trying to photoshop in differences, it made it a lot easier to do but all the tracing can be time consuming.

i have been considering making a follow up game for some time now and had a bunch of ideas of how to make the game more interesting and for more picture based puzzles, i don't want to share them all but one idea i had was for showing the puzzle picture flipped or rotated.

as for making the differences more convincing, it might be easier to add objects into a picture than to take them out convincingly, and colour changes can be very easy to spot so i'd keep them to a minimum, and have a good mixture of small and big differences.
i'm not really that fantastic at photoshopping so i can't give you any tips there really.

[Raider]

For me when I look at spot the dif puzzles, I always go to look for the small hard background stuff first, as that is normally where the changes are. It's hard to explain but the more obvious ones I miss. I only spotted the pole change at number eight where the small background changes that seem to be the hardest I got first.
Does that make sense?

[bicilotti]

First of all good technique: I've found a few differences and the "photoshopping" was quite realistic.

I like the idea of having a theme. It could be anything really, from "the power of Asia" to "top 10 AGS games". If I were in you I'd choose something less colourful than a marketplace (at least in the first few stages), tints distracts me!

But what I wanted to say is:

have you thought of making it "customisable"? With AGS you have the possibility of reading a pic from a folder and, with some simple scripting, to make ags "spot" the differences between two of them.

That'd allow you tons of possibilities:

eg1 - you photoshop a pic to have 20 little differences from the original mode. In one stage AGs picks at random only three of it and you have to spot them having only 30 secs on your clock (blitz mode)

eg2 - same thing but with different effects (always scripted), like Boyd's suggestion of having the second pic flipped or warped in some strange way

eg3 - that'd allow custom levelpacks too (yeah, I know, that damn cube game made me a monothematic person).

Moreover, once the engine is set in stone, you can always change your pics without the hassle of changing hotspots and such.

Mhhh, a great scripting experience it should be: if you need a teammate or just a few tips don't hesitate to PM me!

[Stupot]

@ Boyd - I had a go at your spot the difference game.  It took me ages to realise that one guy's head was missing, haha.

@ Raider - I know, sometimes the seemingly obvious ones are the most difficult to spot (see '@ Boyd' above).

@ Bici - Your plan, especially 'eg1' solves the main problem I had anticipated.  And that was replayability.  It's all well and good telling a player to sit there and spot 10 differences, but once he's found them that's it... Whereas your way would mean each time he plays the level there are a new bunch of differences, and he'd have to play it at least several time in order to find all of the changes.