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[ILER]

The only problem I had with it was the identity of the killer, which I found a little contrived, but that may have been a personal preference.

Yeah this bugged me too...

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It was only because it was the only character who I actually really played "nicely." The only character who I played in a way that seemed to give him redeeming qualities. The other character's had those qualities built in some but this was the only character who I said "Okay... This guy is nice, no matter what despicable things the others do." and then BAM game over.

[close]

PS if you intend to play this, please don't read any spoilers before you do so. I think it will be a much better experience without any knowledge and without the temptation to metagame.

I won't sing it's praises despite the fact I think it's one of the best games I've played in a long time. It's really the kind of thing you have to experience and although I wouldn't tell anyone to go out and buy a PS3 just for this game, if you do own a PS3, don't disregard it until you've tried it. It's definitely a game that can be rented for cheap as you can pretty much complete it in one sitting. I think it probably took me about 8 hours of playtime and I was really going in depth exploring every area and most actions.

Despite the games countless flaws (It crashed for me repeatedly, I lost sound, I kept getting stuck in scenery, the movement controls felt awkward) I managed to overcome all of that because of the sheer level of depth that you feel you are experiencing. Knowing that every action will quite probably have a significant consequence that you can't foresee and must deal with at some point of the game. The character's and their facial emotions reminded me a lot of Foxy Roxxxy in the sense that they are not really very emotive and the voice acting was weak in a lot of places.

I think the story was definitely a fun one to participate in, knowing that you can complete the game regardless of whether you get your characters killed off, if you manage to even find out who the killer is or solve the crime. There was a point where I was too slow in one of the events and got caught and arrested. What happens if you instead manage to get away? There was a part (as shown in the trailer) where I decided to take a leap of faith from a building rather than get caught by my persuers, what happens instead in this situation should I get caught?

The replay value is definitely there, and now that I'm speaking of it I think I might go and start up a second game to see what different impacts I can make on the world should I choose to neglect my child, treat everyone with aggression and succumb to my drug urges.

It looks disappointing, but the biggest "what the fuck" was... Leona Lewis? It totally wrecked the atmosphere there.

Also I consider it to have reached it's peak around the 6,7,8 era, dropping off significantly from 9 onwards, although I did enjoy 9 also.

I have it pre-ordered but I don't hold high hopes.

i stole your car

It is unbelievable how Progzmax hasn't even put this in the tutorials index. All our super evil awsomest backgrounds for nothing. All our very simple basic art tutorials on how to go from pixel art to Masterpiece.
it is sad  :'( how other people wont even get a hell of a laugh experience on art that we all had.

As the author of this topic I was happy to let it run and see where you guys have taken it. I'm very pleased with the result and I'm glad you had so much fun. In regards to adding it to the tutorial database, I think that might potentially be a bad idea, even in jest. Something like this, while fun at first, might possibly become a little tedious and later be filed under the 'What the hell was I thinking?' category. I feel it's better to enjoy it while it lasts and forget about it when it's gone.

Now on a more serious note: Back to you guys.

If you are not interested in improving your work and considering feedback please post your work to General Discussion since this forum is for people who wish to improve (not for people who just want to show something they've made).  If you change your mind about feedback in the next day I'll leave it here, otherwise I'll move this to General Discussion.

Like I said, it's not that I don't want to get criticism. It's just that I can't actually edit it any further. I was still looking for feedback that I could carry forward in general but this song itself is going to stay how it is. It doesn't really matter if you want to move it to general though, I guess it doesn't really make a difference.

"I am not going to edit it any further because my computer can no longer handle it, so any criticisms will be taken into consideration and then ultimately ignored."

What I meant by this was not "don't give me criticism" just that I can't actually do anything about this song.

I'll leave it up to you if you want to leave it here or move it.

If you are going to throw up, do it out the window.

Glad you survived the incident. I had a similar experience some time ago. After an exhausting five hours of composing, I finally saved the mixdown of the funkiest piece of music in the universe and set it to run on loop mode. The first three loops went alright, but then my computer started to have serious problems handling the unlimited funk capacity.

After five loops, it broke. Hewlett Packard sent me a replacement unit within five days and apologized that their computers just weren't built to take such amounts of funk and - in what I conisder a very honest act - advised me to get an IBM because they could withstand even heavy space funk.

If you have an IBM personal computer, play this on infinite loop: http://www.box.net/shared/j7g0vacyml
If not, please be careful.

I must say, I am using a HP so I was hesitant to take the risk, but having now done so it seems the risk was minimal. As funky as your piece may be it is a mere nothingness in relation to the funktasm that is:

http://www.tjande.com/audio/tje_theme.mp3

It appears there is only so much awesome that a computer can handle before it completely gives up and refuses to do anymore. The pressure kicks in and the computer says 'hey pal, I've had enough.' at which point you are confronted with either an error message or a still frame screen of the computers last ditch attempt to process your request before it disappears out back for a cigarette break.

This is the first time in the history of ever where I have recieved an error message that simply said the word: "PANIC." That is no joke. I wish I had taken a screenshot.

Anyway I was working on this song at the time:



I was not making it for any particular purpose other than messing around/exercise I guess. Sometimes I like to kick off the shoes and make something messy, progressive or structurally obscure and this is how far I got before my computer almost exploded and killed me. That's right, I survived a near death experience to bring this to you.

I am not going to edit it any further because my computer can no longer handle it, so any criticisms will be taken into consideration and then ultimately ignored. However I wanted to share it nonetheless.

[HOW TO MAKE BADASS AWESOME BACKGROUNDS FOR YOUR AGS GAME]

HOW TO MAKE BADASS AWESOME BACKGROUNDS FOR YOUR AGS GAME

Step 1: Perspective

The first thing you need to learn about drawing backgrounds is perspective, and then equally how to “break” perspective. As an artist it is our duty to defy the laws of tradition. Perspective is a bad habit and anyone who tells you otherwise probably beats their wife.

Let’s look at the structure of the piece I am putting together for this tutorial.



I appreciate at the moment it doesn’t look like much, but choosing to disregard any noticeable sense of perspective actually frees us from certain rules and adds a level of artistic depth to our piece that I will at the moment refer to as “quirk.” If you are following along at home, take this time to build your own room structure, don’t worry if it looks a bit messy right now, remember that’s just quirk and if anybody mentions it, just put it down to artistic license.

Here’s a few things to take into account when creating your room.

• Don’t worry about sizing the door, your player character can be scaled down to fit.
  
  Okay, done? On to the next bit.
  
  Step 2: Colouring
  
  Before we enter into the realm of colouring, let me just shoot down a little myth (or should I say downright lie) that seems to be floating around at the moment about limiting your colour palette. Don’t. There is an abundance of colours for a reason. You don’t walk into a room in real life and find yourself inside a five colour existence, it’s just not realistic. So keep that in mind when choosing your colours.
  
  The first thing I do is work on the background, which is of course sky. It doesn’t matter where you are the sky is always going to be the background of everything, even if you can’t see it behind walls. Just because the player character can’t see it, does that mean we should restrict the player themselves from being able to see it? No. After all, behind the earth is sky, so at all times sky should be visible. So grab a nice BLUE colour from your palette and use the fill tool to make the background.
  
  
  
  Done that? Great.
  
  Now it’s still looking a bit bland at the moment so this is where gradients come in.  Grab your gradient tool and choose a darker blue colour. Some people will tell you that the sky is always darker closer to the horizon. This is not true. Anybody who knows anything about science will understand that the EARTH MOVES. If the earth moves then it can’t always be looking at the same part of the sky can it? With this in mind, go ahead and draw your gradient anywhere, we can fix this up with some visual trickery later to deceive our audience.
  
  
  
  That looks much better.
  
  Now to finish up on the sky we’re going to add some clouds. Just grab that paintbrush tool and draw in some white patches around there, don’t forget to gradient them as well.
  
  
  
  Looking good.
  
  Alright we’re finished with the sky now so let’s get to work on the inside of our room. I don’t need to tell you what colour things are because it really doesn’t matter so go ahead and use your fill tool to sort it out. Just remember though, due to lighting, walls are NEVER the same colour. (also this makes your room nicer to look at.)
  
  
  
  Step 3: Objects
  
  Our room is looking a little bit empty, so let’s go ahead and fill it up with some objects. Boxes are always good because they are easy to draw, but you could also use any other arbitrary object like a bed or some pipes or something. It doesn’t matter if it has any relevance or if the player actually interacts with it at all, as long as you fill up that empty space. Also you can add hotspots to them later which just say random things like if the player was interacting with a bed you could have him say “It’s not bed time.” Or if it’s a clock it could say “Party time!” Not only does this serve to add interaction to your arbitrary objects but also wastes the players time and makes your game seem significantly longer overall. Two birds!
  
  
  
  As you can see here I’ve added some objects and coloured them too. There are some boxes, a bed, a clock and a picture of Mickey Rooney being eaten by a shark. Not only is this comedic but I have really minimised the empty space of the room.
  
  Step 4: Texturing
  
  Now that my room is structurally complete and chock full of objects, let’s go ahead and texture them. This will definitely give them a little bit more life. I am using Photoshop to do this, with comes packed with all sorts of effects and gizmos I can use to texture my surfaces, but if you’re using paint or any other program you can just click lots of dots over surfaces to give them texture, although you are also a lesser human being for not being cool enough to use Photoshop like me. Here’s what my room looks like complete with texturing.
  
  
  
  It’s probably best practice to texture every single surface. You can shake it up and add gradients to some of them if you want to be a little more subtle.
  
  Step 5: Lightning
  
  We use lightning to brighten up our rooms, otherwise we would be completely in the dark all the time. I know this isn’t exactly realistic but that’s why they’re called “adventure” games. If you can’t put lightning in your game then where’s your sense of adventure? You are probably a nun, go back to boring land.
  
  
  
  I’ve drawn in the lightning, (don't forget to texture!) now we have to show the effect. This is really simple to produce. Everything that the lightning can see, needs to be brighter. We do this by painting some transparent white over it. Make a new layer and set the transparency of the layer to around 70% so you can see it, but still see what’s below it. Take your paintbrush tool and set colour to white and get to work painting. Don’t worry if you go over lines because it’s transparent so nobody will really notice.
  
  
  
  Step 6: Shading
  
  Everything creates a shadow. This is physics and the fact that I am having to tell you makes me a little concerned about what they are teaching you kids in school these days. We make shadows the same way we made everything brighter. A new layer, 70% transparency, but this time we are going to be painting things black, and instead of painting everything we are only going to be painting underneath objects. If you are confused about what I mean, see the following picture for reference.
  
  
  
  As you can see, we’ve come a long way since that first structural line drawing. Our picture now has a lot of depth thanks to the lightning and shading. There’s just one last thing we need to do in order to make it perfect.
  
  Step 7: Lense flares and atmospheric effects.
  
  Lens flares make everything look good. In Photoshop if you go to your “Filters” and then “Render” there are a couple of nice atmospheric effects in there to really spruce up your image. I’m going to render some clouds to give my picture a really foggy look and then overlay some lens flares above that, why don’t you experiment and not copy everything I’ve done because that’s called plagiarism and I will take you to the cleaners if I catch you.
  
  
  
  To conclude, everything I have just told you is the absolute truth. If you disagree with any of this then you are entitled to your own opinion, and by entitled to your own opinion I mean you are wrong and probably have an annoying habit that nobody has told you about because they are too scared to hurt your feelings.
  
  If you've been following along at home feel free to post your own backgrounds that you made using this tutorial but don't do it in this topic, I don't want you dirtying it up.
  
  If a moderator could sticky this topic, I think it's important that everybody reads this.
  
  8)

I made this genie creature.

Just for the sake of it, its not an entry.

Looks awesome, reminds me a lot of Spirited Away.

EDIT: Just realised there was a second page to this post and that was already pointed out

Give me your two cents.

No I don't think I will.

Never before have I ever been so disappointed with cinema. If I wasn't with a group of friends I would have walked out and demanded my money back and believe me I have never before ever felt the need to do that, even during some mindless shit films. What I would like back more than my money however is my time as having just finished watching this film about an hour ago I am still actually ANGRY about how bad it was and how hyped up it has been.

The 3D was so bad I didn't notice it at all throughout the entirety of the film save for the subtitles to the foreign language sections, which kind of stuck out from the screen a bit. Granted I was sitting in a seat near the front of the cinema which my friend, having dragged me to see it after seeing it four times herself assures me did lessen the quality. That however is not really an excuse. I don't want to pay full price to a film and then be told that it only works correctly for the select few people that got prime seating position.

The special effects that were so hyped up were no better as far as I could really tell than any recent videogame and although maybe I could get over that otherwise as they do look nice, it is not cool for James Cameron to hype it so much HIMSELF and then have it turn out to be pretty much the same kind of look that has been around for a few years now already. It wasn't as groundbreaking as he has been saying for so long, and even the 3D has been done before (and I would say better.) Beowulf was not a good film, but as far as I am concerned it was far superior to Avatar.

When you look behind the gimmick of the special effects and the 3D, the storyline is bland and formulaic. Like has been mentioned before it is practically a carbon copy of a few films that have come before and seems to be a complete by-product to the film itself which seems to be all about pioneering these new "groundbreaking" effects. The story is not engaging or entertaining, the relationship between the main character and the Na'avi girl pretty much develops over the course of a montage to go briefly into the level of depth that it goes into (ie none) and the way it executed the political/religious elements were already feeling self-righteous and irritating before the first hour of the film had ticked by. Some of the scripting was so so bad and some of the reactions of the Na'avi were so unconvincing I wanted to throw my dumb 3D glasses at the screen.

The Na'avi looked stupid as hell, the film almost completely lacked substance, it was not groundbreaking and it did not at all live up to the hype. I can't understand how this film is getting the kind of praise I am seeing and the kind of fanatical devotion to advertising it to anybody that hasn't seen it and bandwagoning onto "the greatest film ever made."

I would say that anybody with any respect for substance in cinema should bypass this pathetic gimmick film, but I won't because it seems I'm the only person in the world with this opinion. The response I am seeing to this film seems to alienate me from everyone else and that kind of baffles me. It would point the finger at me and say clearly as I am the only person with this opinion I must be wrong, but I don't think I am.

The only saving grace of the film is that sometimes... there are shiny glowy things that float across the screen and they are nice to look at. Everything else to me is nothing more than insult. Never before have I ever been so angry and disappointed.

James Cameron, thanks for striking a massive blow to my optimism in cinema.

If we choose to keep the notes the same, can we instead opt to change the timing of each note?

I know you said you're not working on it anymore but I just noticed the topic so I'll go ahead and post a comment in case you get round to seeing it. The instruments of the song sound very synthetic, which could just be an issue of you using the default sounds of a keyboard or that came pre-packed with your production package. Maybe you used synths to try and emulate the sound of an orchestra yourself but complete with the drums and that raging synth it sounds very retro game soundtrack. (Maybe that's what you were going for? Not really a criticism.)

I am going by the first link you posted in the thread here, but I would consider cutting the drum track entirely if it is a soundtrack piece. It would take some of the lower depth out of the song but at the moment it is also a little jarring in comparison with the rest of the piece. I really like the harp(?) section and the song develops really nicely. I admit when I first heard that initial synth I was unsure, and some of the deeper synth parts of the song get a bit muddy to listen to, kind of overwhelming the rest of the music. They drone a bit sluggishly later in the piece and I don't know if they're just too loud but they seem to swallow up the other instruments. After the flute kicks in for it's "solo" everything lightens up but then as the drums come back in, an additional synth line is added that just seems too heavy.

I'll tell you what this reminds me of also, one of my favourite videogame tunes of all time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHldsUriXLc

Anyway, it sounds like a pretty complete song at the moment so I wouldn't worry about "failing to complete it." It's good.

I'm actually more impressed by the 7-leg spider story (search more to find out what happened to the picture at the very end). It's a bit different in context though.

Thanks for killing the last 3 hours of my life.

Completely undeserving of the hype.

What a waste of time.

No those were not real in game hotspot descriptions. I was just trying to sum up the redundancy of those objects. Anyway seeing as this is a game that you believe is worth money, I felt it was important to give honest criticism. In regards to the installer, possibly an issue of my own personal bias but I have plenty of times refused to install a small independant game using an installer unless it is necessary.

So at first I thought it looked pretty uninteresting. The way it was sold seemed to sell heavily a gore-factor which I'm not so interested in unless it can be backed up with a good narrative that justifies it. However the game seems to have got a lot of praise so I figured I would at least try out the demo, which is quite big (I would consider at 70+MB.) The first thing to note now that I have downloaded the demo, for anybody else considering trying it. The size of the game does not relate to any amount of length. The demo is short. Secondly I came to my first turnoff at this point.

Why an installer? For a demo even too. This is a big turnoff for me on something that I might not want to keep installed. I like being able to run the game straight from the archive and decide then whether or not I want to keep it or not. I don't want to have to commit it to my system before I even know if it's any good. Secondly this presented me with another issue in that it booted the game straight into fullscreen mode which I don't think many people use these days. I then couldn't find a way to get it into windowed mode so I figured I would try pressing the F buttons, F1, F2 etc. The game crashed out with an error at F2. Deciding to give up on that I figured I would hunt down the .cfg file or a readme and only then did I find the setup file buried deep in my program files folder.

I haven't even started the game at this point.

Okay so I finally get the game started and greeted with this obscure, atmosphere breaking music that doesn't seem to blend well with the game at all and I work my way through the first scene which seems to be a fairly simple item combine puzzle. The game doesn't really present any storyline at this point, I wouldn't expect a dream sequence to have one but the game doesn't really set you up with any kind of motivation to continue other than the expectancy that at some point a storyline might start.

So I wander around and click on anything that's highlightable and look at everything that is a hotspot until I stumble into the area I am supposed to be. At which point I think something interesting might be happening but still don't know what that is as the lack of narrative is still there and the writing up until this point has been fairly bland and uninteresting. I would also like to mention that the hotspot dialogues seem rushed and are fairly pointless.

"No I don't need to interact with that."
"You are stupid. Why would you even click on that ashtray."
"Don't be a moron. There is no reason for me to at all interact with this calendar."

Then I wander around every available area of the game that I have found so far THREE TIMES looking for something to do and then realise that I didn't hover my mouse over a small portion of one of the screens and therefore missed an entire other location and then the demo ends with no cliffhanger or anything and I am left with no feelings that I want to continue playing this game.

OKAY. I am sorry about that. I wanted to get all the negativity out of the way first so by the time you finish reading the post you might have forgotten about it, because it's not to say that the whole thing is bad. It's just if the writing continues in the way the demo suggested, then the only thing I have to look forward to is what I expected in the first place. Some level of gore/depravity.

I would like to compliment the artwork. That at least is well done and definitely helps portray the atmosphere. In fact it is possibly responsible for the entirety of the atmosphere and holds together very well considering the points I mentioned earlier. Each scene in the demo looks great and from what I've seen of the other screenshots it will continue and get better. However I am not convinced that it's for me to buy and continue to play.

I would also say the internet is more credible than word of mouth

ESSAY ESSAY ESSAY
Sources: Well my mum said.

First rule of research: at least TRY looking it up in Wikipedia and google:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Game_Studio
http://www.americangirlscouts.org/agswiki/AGS_Version_history

Not meaning to sound rude here, but that's exactly what I can't do. My speech teacher doesn't trust the internet for a reliable source, but he will if somebody says it. I'm hopeing that a forum will count.

Then your teacher is pretty freakin' dumb. I can understand not using the internet as a source if it is something interpretive but looking up a date, you aren't allowed to use the internet? And looking at factual forum information provided by the forum itself is not a reliable source? Like if the forum says (as it does on the main forum page at the bottom) "Total Members: 4892" -- that is not a credible source? The actual forum itself?

Clarify with your teacher that you didn't misunderstand what he meant when he said the internet was not a reliable source for ANY INFORMATION WHATSOEVER EVER. If in fact that is what he said and you didn't misunderstand him then tell him I called him an idiot.