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Mine didn't turn out quite like I wanted it to, probably due to poor composition, but, nevertheless, here it goes:


An office at the top floor of the Victoria Heights building in New Brussels, year 1919 in an alternative universe. Heavily inspired by architecture of Victor Horta. Obligatory retro-futuristic zeppelin outside the window is not included.

really can't see any bad composition here.
in fact, the moment i saw this picture i wanted to live in that universe
beautiful atmosphere!

i need your help finding an ags game which was released about 3 to 4 years ago.
generally it was a comedy game. there was a pipe smoking moon and as i remember there was blues music during the game. unfortunately i can't remeber anything else atm but i guess you'll know which one i mean.

think i found it... the long trip

the only thing i find looks strange is the big cloud. at first glance i thought there was a very big mountain. maybe the transition is a tad to hard.

the lighthouse is supposed to be a little bit further away right? not right on top of the cliff we are seeing. then it's ok. otherwise i think it would be too small since the bay doesn't look that huge.

i would be interessted in kind of a tutorial for this kind of background aswell. especially how you go about resolution, antialiasing and colours.

the ripples in the sand are awesome btw.

what i ment was that not only am i not yet working on a game but that i don't even have any particular idea/story for a game. so there's a high chance that the sprite will never show up in any game. as i was saying, mainly for grafical style finding and training purposes.
thanks for your concerns though.

old & new

updates:
- new shoes
- adapted drop shadow
- jeans shading improved (i think)
- new zipper
- slightly longer and bent arms
- few changes on the hoddie
- nose

so what about the nose? is it any better?

i left the lightsource where it is since i'm not working on any game so far. so that's not an issue at the moment. (btw, if someone's planning a game i might join, pm's are welcome). this is rather a test to find an appealing grafical style i can live with.
i see that the dithering can be a lot of work when animating but i really like dithered shading and rather want to keep it.

thanks for the input guys. keep it coming.

hello,
so this is my very first attempt at drawing/pixeling ..well, anything. so i began by trying to pixel myself. i started by pixeling over this zak mckracken sprite because of it being the best game developed so far. i ended up with this.
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although i obviously love the style of zak mckracken, i felt that i needed a little bit more space and detail. so i doubled the resolution of my sprite and pixeled over it again. this is what i came up with.
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now, i guess i'm happy with the head..the shoes are almost still the ones from zak but i think they are ok, they look just like mine
but what do i do with the rest? especially the legs and the hands? the legs are flat and the hands just look stupid. tips on the hoodie are welcome aswell.
i couldn't come up with a way to shade the legs, so i tried dithering them. here's my poor attempt at that.
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not really satisfying. also, do dithering and other shading techniques even go with each other? not that i sticked to any rules anyway. i'd love to do dithered shading in general but i wasn't able to apply it on the face or hoodie.

any advise on improving this sprite is appriciated. especially paintovers. those are always welcome. also i would like to hear some critics on the overall style from the colours and pixel art view.

speaking of overall style, here is me in some strange colourful environment. this wasn't pixeled or dithered by hand. it was achived by gradients, filters and various colour adjustments. without dithering the character doesn't seem to fit in there so well, i think.
x2

alright, i will take a nap now. have been sitting in front of my pixel self for quite a while now..
hopefully there will be some helpful responses.. good night

For me the same happens as for CJ. Runs jerky with the first exe but runs fine when i run the source game.

Woah, nice!
I really like how the room editor turned out.. Well done!

If you want to make it even more awesome: While zoomed in it would be very comfortable to able to scroll up and down with the mouse wheel as well as using the space bar for panning, just like you do in photoshop. I instantly wanted to do that by habit.

Glad this has made it into 3.0.1!

The ability to zoom the room background to make it easier to draw walkable areas and walkbehinds in the editor?

Ah yes, this old chestnut. I should really get this done.

I`d love the ability to have semitransparent walkable areas and walkbehinds. I find drawing a bit painful not seeing the background under the area.

But this has nothing to do with drawing transparent walkbehind areas etc. onto my backgrounds, does it?  Cause i can`t find that option.

You can't draw onto room area masks at runtime. What you can do is change the walk-behind baseline using the SetWalkBehindBase command to enable/disable the area.

No no, sorry. What i thought this feature was is that while editting a room you now could draw your walkbehind areas with semi-transparent colour.
Hope that clears the missunderstanding

Hi
I was very happy to read that in beta 13 theres this new feature:

Added COLOR_TRANSPARENT option to DrawingSurface.DrawingColor property to allow you to draw transparent areas onto the image

But this has nothing to do with drawing transparent walkbehind areas etc. onto my backgrounds, does it? Cause i can`t find that option.

First I made the mistake that when I wanted to create a walkable area I accidentally clicked with the area select tool in the preview window without having created an area before. Because of that it always told me I was using the eraser and I didn`t seem to be able to create an area until i created a new room and switched back to my old one.

Heh, it got stuck in "hotspot 0". You probably would have gotten it to work if you had chosen a different colour, therefore started colouring a different hotspot. Not a big problem, really, and makes sense.

Ah, yes I see. But then I wouldn`t be able to use walkable/walkbehind area number 0 anymore. Or would I? Because there it still says i`m using the eraser.

e: Thanks for clearing this, Gilbot.

As regards non-transparent areas, it's just a matter of practice. My favourite personal method consists of deleting, at a stroke, most of the borders of the walkable/walk-behind, leaving only the center, then doing the corrections I want, and then FILLing the space in-between. But of course you can use masks.

That`s also the way I did it. But still I think you could do it much faster if you could delete right to the point you want to.

Here is a first impression from a brand new user.

I`ve followed the developement of ags for about a year now but never brought myself to beginning a game. Yesterday I started working through the tutorial because I wanted it to be up to date for 2.8. It`s nice and easy to follow by the way. However the first thing which really bothered me was area painting in the room editor.

First I made the mistake that when I wanted to create a walkable area I accidentally clicked with the area select tool in the preview window without having created an area before. Because of that it always told me I was using the eraser and I didn`t seem to be able to create an area until i created a new room and switched back to my old one.

Then when I got to paint my areas and tested the game I realized that my walkable and walkbehing areas weren`t quite good so I wanted to correct them. But that became a really tough task because of the non transparent areas. I just didn`t know up to where I needed to delete my walkbehind area for example because I couldnt see whats behind it. I don`t know if semi-transparent areas are on the suggestion tracker for the tracker doesn`t seem to work.

The third thing which bothered me was that I was only able to undo one step but I know that more undo steps are already on the to do list.

I haven`t worked through the whole tutorial yet. Only the first 3 pages. I can post how I am getting along with the rest of the tutorial and where a new user like me is getting into trouble if that is wanted.
Sorry for complicated writing for german is my native language.