Topics

A quick question about my workflow for animation. Is it sensible?

I sketch an animated sequence on paper with a simple lightbox and scan in the frames. I trace it with graphics gale because it has pixel perfect precision with its smooth line tool.
I noticed, that this takes alot of time. The tracing I mean. However, most other techniques for cleaning up lineart (such as contrast, brightness) are best for higher resolutions.
That's all I know about game art at this point. I can't work with a tablet, so I stick with pencil and pen.

Any comments on the workflow I would appreciate. Good? Bad? Is there a better way? etc.

My other question is about smooth animation. Sorry, I did not mention this, but as a side note - I'm just starting out with asset art. I noticed that when moving a single static image in a walk, in the editor when the game is launched to test, it is very jumpy. Very uncomfortable to look at. I figured, as soon as I have more frames for a walk cycle, it will be more pleasing to look at. I wanted an opinion on how I could implement any techniques to make sure that I calculate for a smooth animation. Is there a good way to plan this? There are lot's of walk cycle tuts out there, so I'm not asking for an art lesson, but if its the kind of example you have, please post it. More so, I would like to figure out what kind of other difficulties I might run into as far as animation is concerned.

My personal goal is original King's Quest style graphics enhanced for a better resolution. So I would like to keep things more cartoony, but colors and shading very simple. So 320x* and etc. would not be a good starting point to scale up from since the views need a larger surface area to composite the scenes. I even went as far as 1024x768, but the scaling system is hard to judge.

Any help whatsoever as advice for reaching my goal, would be great!

I'm interested in learning about the big picture of how ags works. If you understand how to read the ags source code for the game engine, can you please answer a couple of questions for me?

1. AGS is written using allegro - is this all that is necessary for the graphics capabilities? or are there other extensions to the programming api?

2. In this style of game engine, you click on a point in the screen and your character walks there. The concept is simple, as there is a sprite sheet that is cycled through as the character moves. Can someone explain, not necessarily in actual code (but it helps if you can point it out in the source), how this is done with allegro. How is this motion timed? The heart of a point and click adventure is the ability to move a character on the screen while there are other animated sprites. How does ags actually do it under the hood?

The source code base for ags is huge, so many files, that it's not simple enough for me to figure out where to look for relevant code snippets. I'm not a professional programmer, but I have been looking at animation and animated
sprites and I wanted to know how difficult it would be to actually plan a feature such as this, that is fundamental to point and click adventures. I currently am practicing with visual c# and basic, and I am trying some code
snippets in c and c++.

A little more about me -> I have not completed a point and click adventure yet, and I'm trying out ags. I'm not currently working on a game, just learning about game development. I hope this is the right place to ask.