Artwork inspired from other games

[Pomperipossas_Godishus]

This is my first post on the formum...

I allways been a fan of Adventure games and Monkey Island, was I think, the first Adventure game I'we ever played.

Many persons want to make fan games, then Disney, Squaresoft, or other game companies, destroying everything
and banning the games. As I'm quite artistic and maybe will starting an AGS project, when the time is right. I came
to the conclution, how overcome this problems. It's pretty easy and giving (forcing) the artists, to becoming better
in drawing.

Take some picture, from an Adventuregame of choice, like Monkey Island, look at the contures, geometry, perspective
in the picture, and use this to build your own picture, of cause it shall not look similiar to the original, a ball, could
become water melon, or something else. but it will helping the artists. When finnished, you may reversing the picture
in some paint program.

When I start with pictures, I often starting pretty small, on an A4 paper, drawing the picture, then scanning it and
make it much bigger. I found out (at least for myself), if one start with small versions of the picture, it's a lot faster
to make the picture itself.

With this in mind, let's get inspired and make our own game, inspired from Monkey Island, create a character, based
from one, two, three games, mix them together. Make a sleazy Guybrush with the looks of Leisure Suit Larry, or make
Guybrush Threepwood female, than a male.

I believe, if we want to make a new Monkey Island, and using this technique, no other game company could saying you
broke the copyright law. At the same time people understand, it is meant to become a Monkey Island fan game, hidden
and built, behind inspired graphic. This also is a good way to training ones own artistic abilities.

Hope enjoying this post and looking forward your comments

[miguel]

I'm more of an original content person. I don't want to put your ideas down but think about all the work you'll have to draw, paint and animate those characters and, in the end, will be...well, copies of the original ones.
If, on the other hand someone comes up with the idea of "capturing" the mood and art style of a particular "classic" game then it's a different story.

But this is just my opinion, and I'm very conservative about this matters. I just think that a bad original game has more value than a somewhat nice fan game.

[Azure]

It's already been done several times Gilbert Goodmate and Pirates of Vooju island spring to mind. The latter was based on a Monkey Island pitch that got rejected by LucasArts. Also you seem to be saying people can trace and get away with it? well you can but doesn't mean you can't get in trouble if you straight up trace.

[Snarky]

Well, it depends on exactly how you do it, I suppose. I can sort of see it in some cases. I was working on an Oceanspirit Dennis game for a while, and the opening was based on Secret of Monkey Island:

[IMGzoom]http://i.imgur.com/vQ0XOwS.png[/IMGzoom] [IMGzoom]http://i.imgur.com/j0nQbdv.png[/IMGzoom]

I didn't trace it, except for the sprite, which is a direct Guybrush paintover, but used it as a template for the colors and overall composition (I had to change it a little bit because it's also the screen for the game menu). But of course, the point in this case was to spoof/pay tribute to the old classic. I wouldn't do it and hope no one noticed.

[Pomperipossas_Godishus]

Wow! It's a beautyfull picture. I personally think the background is inspired from Monkey Island 1. The background has some similarities, or, at least on the contures. Monkey Island opening is on a mountain top, while your Schreenshoot is on the sea. I'm looking forward to see when you made a big Adwenture game based on Ocean Spirit Dennis, with this kind of pretty graphic