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this is an awesome livingroom, i wanna sit in this chair and fumble around as it would be a spaceship cockpit!
unfortunately my project isnt far enough to deserve sounds of any kind but i note your email/msn down and if im in need of a musician, ill maybe contact you.

most of your work sounds like some sort of electronical-outer space-meditation-music (but good though), are you able to produce music which actually sounds like its made with common instruments (guitar, piano, fiddle..) ?

after programming a shoot em up myself via delphi for about 2 years i got pissed off from putting game elements next to program elements in an very unprofessional way. So i decided to design my on editor to make games. But it shouldnt be a shoot em up editor althought this would be "pretty easy". I wanted something bigger like an adventure, or strategy-game editor. I made a choise: adventure. since there is no a.i. in it.

10minutes later while googling through the net i found the AGS editor which contains more features that i could create in 5years... fighting back my tears i struggled one weak wether i should go the AGS path or not..

now im here

first of:I'm no genius in paint so do not hesitate to dont like whatI'm proposing.

When working on a space-shot-em-up a long time ago i found a neat way to make your stars more shiny
(vary with there forms and brightness a bit)

the colorsceme below is a very powerfull tool (rightclick any color and it'll show up) to do some lightnings or shadows.

and light effects are nearly the same, here an very crude example on how you could proceed:

with far more shades it will look more realistic.

it is a lot of work for an effect which took you 2 clicks with a more appropriate  tool called "gradient" which is implimented in many comercial programs (paint.net is freeware i guess)


your brother seemed to used another program too cause the "preview screen" of your last game contains a gradient

while reading all this i get the faintest idea even the staff of lucas art had given this problem rather less thoughts so, why bother?

dont like the new pixel version that much btw. looks like a jedi as phemar said and in my opinion looks much older, as he loses hair allready.. (but technically well done althought)

"I wish I'd thought of that!" 

exactly my first thought and mien.

this looks amazing, cant wait to play it!

I like this thread =)
anyway if you're going to make an RPG i would recommend you "RPG Maker" this is a far more powerfull editor for your concepts. Just google it, it should be easy to find (i know there is a huge german community and doubtless although english ones)

good luck

ps: i recommend you to plan your project more detailed

first of: nice sketch, a worthy tribut to what he looked like.

althought i think non of the sprite- or background styles of any monkey island chapter produced an atmosphere equal to MI2 (it took weeks till i finished it because i cant but to gaze every single background or animation) but his "new look" fairly supports his character in my opinion.

thank you all for your marvelous help, you guys are awesome!
I just began working on my first game now (i now overdraw the sketches with a fineliner for non-messy outlines)  and am able to use all the helpful hints i learned.

I'm still struggling about the solution so i will just create it in two versions, a big and a small one. That shouldn't take much extra time.


this is a community im really looking forward to nestle down in.
hats off.

thx for your comments abisso and matti, youre right, the outlines still look terrible =( this is a problem caused by the carelessness with which i create the first sketch (with pencil). Since im very new to Photoshop i dont know any elegant solution to solve this problem.. i filled big gaps with vectors now and small gaps with the brush but still am not satisfied:

as you can see, the tree, the trail, and the stone are reworked but look somehow inappropriate. The reason why i anyhow post this picture is to clarify my next concern:

The picture i edit is about 1330Pixel / 860Pixel big, so i am allowed to use every possible resolution for my game but still  im taken with the idea of a 320/200 or 320/240 resolution. This may be 'cause with good adventures i associate those old amiga-adventures and infact im sad about not being that good in pixel my backgrounds. Anyway, to scale down the bg will stash away most of the outline mistakes.

here an example:


so and as i said i loved that pixely stile of for example monkey island 2, i tryed just another thing. I simulate a lower quality, that would look like this:


1. does it look better?
2. is it "ethical correct" to lower the quality of my bg or are there better ways?
3. of course there are better ways, but which are they.

PS: oh, i didnt ignore the hint with the hills and the sun, it looks great but since this background will most likely never appear in my game since its just a picture i designed to point out how my style is going to be and to ask you how i can improve it, i was to lazy to put em in.

Bensch

Hello cpage,
i definitly prefere the first one. The second looks great as a painting but in a game the first beats the pants of it. The outlines dont fit in to the rest at some points (toolbox, cable across the room, right end of the flag) also the jointings (ouf is it the right word?) on the floor dont appeal to me in the second picture.
In addition the first one doesnt look that handdrawn, so your (awesome!) character fits more in it.

besides that, both, your character- and background-style are really close to what i wish i could design.
which program do you use?

the flag doesnt seem to be affected by lights and shadows in both versions.

thx folks, and espacielly cpage, your picture helped me a lot to understand what i did wrong.
so i fixed the sky and made the shadows stronger as bog suggested. Therefor i used darker colors instead of just black ( i hope that is what cpage ment with "..try to steer away from shading with black"



now im afraid the picture went got to dark. Well for a painting it would be ok but i dont know how it would look with a character and objects in it.

oh, and do you see? i tried out some effects with the trail and the nearer gras since they were such unichrome, how do you like that?

Bensch

thanks a lot for the hints.
I edited the background, is there more depth now? (i didnt like the sun anyway)

I tried to make the outlines both: thicker and smoother but i guess i dont know the most effective tool (using PS CS4). Its hard because in the original sketch (pen) there are lines which are thicker then others although theyre supposed to be thinner (dunno how to express that..) and some lines just didnt made there way through the scanner.
the result:


Im really bothered by the trail btw - it is, besides the unlogical but nice looking shadow, such monochrome. I miss a natural looking surface, would you agree?

ahoy cats.
since i'd heard of this AGS i was sniffing around here and now its time to get down to buisiness. I will set up my first adventure game projekt and naturally it wont be a manageable small game which helps me to learn the basic technics as it would be smart to do, no it has to be something big  .
And as its in the nature of "big projects" its graphic should be more then "..well the story is kinda nice after all.."
So it would be adorable if you can give me advice about:

1.Wich Sample do you like more? With or without Shadows?
2.What should be improved in general to make the backgrounds more apealing?
3.Is this a grafic you would feel comfortable while playing the appendent game?





beside the fact that i rather randomly blop shadows where i want em to be than really to understand how lightsources and shadows work, they (the shadows) might seem imprecise. This is because i worked very sketchy since this isnt a background for my game but a picture i just painted to check out how my style would look like. So imagine them at the same spot they are but more precise.


Thanks for your help

Bensch