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I love the main character. Cute and grotesque at the same time...

The art looks great! The historian sprite looks suspiciously Bernard-like...

This is a little complicated, so it was hard to figure out where to put this...

I've hand drawn some sketches and would like to put them on the computer. I haven't colored them yet and was planning to do it on the computer.

Because the drawings were in pencil, there are all kinds of shades of grey on them. I'd really like to make it just a black and white drawing to make things simple. Is there a program that can do this for me? Revert the dark grey to black and make everything else white? I know I could make two layers and have the sketch in the background and go over it in black on the top layer, but I'm simply terrible at drawing with a mouse...

Any ideas?

*Tips hat to Renal*

Nicely done, sir.

People insist to look at the violent or more hedonistic parts of games. Half-Life 1 and 2 were great games. Sure there was a lot of shooting, but still... I'd go so far as to say that Half-Life is practically a 3d adventure game. Not 100% of course; there are MANY shells tossed about. You can't judge it if you haven't played it. There are many moments involving clever thought just like an adventure game. These games have a unique and entertaining story. There's a wonderful atmosphere to go alongside it all too. Aside of Half-Life though, you're all right, there isn't much in the ways of innovation in the FPS world.

Someone said GTA is trash, or something along those lines. There are people who play the game solely to carve people with chainsaws, but not everyone who has this game is a moron. There's a wide appeal to this game for a reason. It's all about freedom. I own the game alongside my (Possibly bootlegged) copy of MI and Civilization (3 and 4). Playing GTA is a lot more like Civ than you'd imagine. What's mercilessy stabbing an old lady to death in GTA compared to mercilessly wiping out an entire civilization in Civ 4? GTA just gets more into the gritty than other games do and gets in trouble for doing it. There are plenty of things to do aside of killing people. The storyline, voice acting, and overall direction of the game is easily among the greatest in video games.

For the record, I'm not some kid on testosterone who thinks GTA and FPS's are the only games worth playing. I love my old lucasarts adventure games as much as anyone on this board, and my favorite game of all time is Super Mario World. I'm just tired of these games getting a bad rap for having-shock-violence in them. Just because an art form has violence in it doesn't mean it can't also be as deep, meaningful, or downright aweome as something without violence, despite how many producers continue to put "Now with more blood than ever!!!" on the box. Violence isn't the problem with video games. Didn't Romeo & Juliet have everyone die a meaningless, horrible death at the end?

I'm 18, raised in this rightfully called "Poor kids of today" generation, but am at a healthy medium between "Things were so much better in the old days..." and "Anything made before I was five isn't worth playing". Kids will latch onto new classics. Bad games of the era will be forgotten and kids will partake in this very conversation later in life. To sum up the entire talk of "How are kids going to experience games", I think this wipes it up nicely...

"The more things change, the more they stay the same..."

(However I'm not smart enough to know who coined this phrase, heh)

The problem with some sequels is that the movie almost acts like the preceding film never happened... POTC goes a little too far in the other direction... it was annoying to hear the same exact lines in very similar situations as what happened in the first film. You could almost tell they were coming, in a bad way. Not that this happened a bunch or that I didn't love the first one, but I found these moments uninspired.

It wasn't a huge problem, though. The length was. The entire cannibal sequence had nothing to do with the main plot. It was fun sure, and really that's what matters most, but it had practically nothing to do with the story. The scene where Elizabeth faked fainting on the beach while Jack, Will, and the washed up commodore were fighting was unintentionally funny and completely useless. The water wheel fight scene was great, but it dragged on I thought. These three had been fighting for a good while now and it was starting to get dull. Maybe they could have cut out a lot of the previous fighting?

I thought Davey Jones was very good. His voice and look and everything was nothing short of awesome, except for the organ-playing session. The character should have been explored more though... I know almost nothing about him. His crew was laughable at best though... am I supposed to be intimidated by some guy with a hammerhead shark head in place of a human one? Or the one with a hermit crab for a head? Stupid.

Jack really was just a bumbling idiot in this one. He's no longer the smooth, manipulative, unorthodox hero of old; replaced with a guy who practically does nothing right. Elizabeth and William were flat characters. There were a lot of things wrong with the movie, but you know what? It was fun to watch. The good easily outweighs the bad. There were plenty of memorable moments. The effects were great as was the music. And I loved the twist ending, the voodoo lady, Davey Jones, and the action. No other pirate movies have come out for a long time, and it's a nice change of pace to watch a movie placed in a mysterious version of sail-era carribean than to watch another by-the-books action flick. It's a good movie set in a superb universe. 4/5

Always a fan of Hot for the Teacher by Van Halen... But then again, I don't listen to music almost at all...

Eh I think Penguin meant moving the arms up and down... The way you've got them moving now looks like he's trying to walk...

Watch a daytime talk show real quick or something; seems like those people always talk moving their hands. Might give you some ideas...

The sprite looks great though! Reminds me of Morpheus from Sandman!

It'd be nice to have a dumpster located conveniently below his apartment window

Perhaps the puzzle part could be that there are bars over the window and he has to find a way to squeeze the body through or something? Just a thought

Lots of useful stuff here; theories on puzzles, everything...

http://www.adventuredevelopers.com/features.php

Bill Tiller, the guy who did backgrounds in CMI, wrote this about how he did them. VERY good read for anyone interested in any kind of art, not just art to do with games.

http://website.lineone.net/~john.montgomery/howtodrawmonkeys.html

Much like the first site; lots of theories on game design, puzzle design, anything...

http://www.lucasstyle.com/tutorials.htm

An interview with Bill Tiller; more stuff about his style and some nice pictures.

http://www.scummbar.com/resources/articles/index.php?newssniffer=readarticle&article=1013&page=2

That's about it; hope it helps someone!

Sorry if I come off a bit pessimistic, it's just what I do 

Taffytom's was good, but the high-school setting just doesn't seem right to me... never been able to take high schoolers seriously, despite me being 18 heh

Tuomas' was kinda confusing and long without an ending proper, but fit together very well!

Biothlebop's was the best, it reminded me of film noir more than any of the others. The ending confused me a little, seemed out of line... But it still gets the vote from me. Great job!

I like to criticize my stuff too; of course it was very cheesy. Cliches all over the place. Was fun to put the hell/devil references in, though.

eh I killed teh contest... 

http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/Far_from_the_sky.zip

There we go!

It might not be true film noir, but that's alright. I've never seen a film noir flick, so makes my knowledge pretty small... however, I've seen some parodies of the style, played max payne, and read the stories posted above, so it seems pretty close. Even if it isn't on-topic, I enjoyed writing it.

P.S. Thanks to taffytom for helping me with the uploading situation. And sorry it's in notepad; I don't usually write on this computer.

I don't even know any uploading websites; I don't usually do that sort of thing (uploading)

And the thing is, the story's looking pretty good, despite my general modest-ness about anything I do

If I were more computer literate (sad, really, my skill with computers) I'd submit something, but I don't know how to do the "link to a page where your story is" thing. It might already be a topic somewhere else or something (Although I didn't see it), could someone maybe post a sticky with a tutorial for how to do this for all us noobs? Much appreciated 

It's a combination of a few things. For one, gamers today just aren't clever enough to solve the puzzles in most adventure games. We have no idea what to do or how exactly to do it.

Which brings me to the other main reason: the UI. It's very time-consuming in a game to have to mouse to find a hotspot, mouse to click "Look at" (or on an eyeball, or examine, whatever) and then click on said hotspot. The same goes for any other interaction. Newcomers to the genre see this as veeeerrrrry inefficient. This can be fixed really easy; I think it'd be nice to map "walk here" to the left mouse button (already done) and, since it's used so much more than any other interaction, "look here" would be nice if it was just a double-click away. Right clicking would yield a sims-style interaction menu with every interaction just within reach of the mouse. I know something similar was done with MI3 and full throttle, but the game was overall simplified because they used icons instead of words. Like i said, the sims games did this very well. Lots of people remember this kind of interface, but I just never see it in fangames despite how great it is. Doing this alone would help adventure games reach a wider audience.

I'm new to adventure games; before last year the closest I'd ever played to an adventure game was zelda, so my initial frustrations are fairly fresh    Still a great genre, heh

Well that's why I posted it for critic-ing. It's not supposed to be particularly exciting, it's just supposed to be fairly standard adventure-game fare. I wasn't shooting for any sort of award.

The "something wierd happens... then something wierd happens..." idea applies to practically every game, that's just usually the way it works. And none of the transitions to the next wierdest thing are very jarring; they'd all be presented in a way that's pretty... subtle I guess, can't think of another word to describe it. This could be applied to the entire game; it never takes itsself too seriously, and that's why it never seems that "Your mankind's last hope!" or "You have to save the world!"

I appreciate the criticism stuff and I wish more people would tell me what's wrong with it, so I hope I didn't come off as some kinda defensive-attitude type person. Not that this has to do with much of anything, but I hated scary movie... felt like it was just trying to rip off the older (and better) Naked Gun movies.

So.... I guess there's nothing wrong with it?

I figured it'd be complicated because... well, it's got the government involved, which is not always popular.

It was always supposed to be cartoony and funny, just in a different sort of way than in most adventure games... except the first few rooms from Sam and Max. Those were the best parts of the game, because they were fairly realistic and pretty gritty, but the characters just made fun of it. That's what I was kinda shooting for when I said the thing about being realistic.

The main character is kinda like Alexander Zale from cirque de zale, except he doesn't wanna get home too bad and doesn't really whine. And nicer lol. The big guy is  smart, doesn't say too much, and usually has things under control.

I noticed I didn't put some parts in... like how you pair up with the big guy and how the world has kinda changed because of the aliens... in the way that you meet prototype robots that don't really know why they were made. I used the sci-fi setting, just not to the extent and not the same way others do, and that's what makes it different. Really, the only problem story-wise, is that over half the game is cutscenes... lol have to shorten that a bunch. The only problems with things non-story related are... everything lol

Ya I'm new to the boards, but everyone starts one time. I've had a story floating around in my head for a while for an adventure game, but I just don't have the drawing/scripting/everything else needed to make a game... Kinda sad (especially for me) but not really anything I can do about it. And note this is kinda a rough draft. And I don't have names for my characters (I try to nail down the actual character part before the name)

The style is kinda sarcastic and has a fairly cartoony (not as much as lucasarts stuff though) look to it, so It's not supposed to be extremely serious.

You start off as a normal teenager. There's nothing special about him, he's not even very popular or anything. He's a pretty carefree person, but in a sarcastic way. One night he's kidnapped from his bed and that's where it starts.

He wakes up in a jail-like facility. There are other people there, and he eventually learns that his kidnappers were from three months into the future. He doesn't really take it too seriously, and is eventually broken out of the building by some big guy who kinda busts in to get him out. He's told the whole story on the way to a "hideout"

Basically, aliens have landed, but the aliens are exactly like humans. They tried to take over the world for a short time, but eventually agreed with the government and now have their own chunk of land. However, the aliens couldn't keep humans as slaves, but the aliens wanted to take the world over still. The obvious solution? Go to the past and take as many humans as they can to the future, where they keep them, which is what happened to you! So you're goal is to stop the main alien guy and get back home.

It sounds too complex for an adventure game, but it'd work I'm posotive. Some environments include a dump for rich people and a giant, fake mountain that's a military base, a hobo's back-alley t-shirt shop, and an evil shoe factory. Fun, fun, fun... ! What do you guys think needs work out of that stuff?