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A nice to have feature for animation work is the ability to select a series of frames and reverse the order that they play in. Terminology differs per program, here's Aseprite and Krita:





Makes it very quick to make an animation play forwards and backwards using a single loop of a viewframe without having to check in code if it's finished or not. That's very handy for background animations like a curtain blowing in the wind.

The additions of overlays and blending modes means that AGS is starting to be capable of some lovely little visual effects that were either not possible or less easy to do previously. However currently the Tint function is a bit limited - perfectly fine for making characters and objects take on a bit of colour, but not that great for more intricate work.

My first thought would be to use DynamicSprite.CopyTransparencyMask but the manual warns that this is quite slow, and so I haven't even attempted to experiment with it. We've all seen that efficient use of AGS script is hardly my specialty.

What I'm proposing would be an effect that recolours all pixels of a sprite to an RGB value while leaving the alpha channel unchanged. Similar to Tint, but instead of an adjustment, a complete recoloring. Here's a simple use case to help showcase how this might be useful:



Here I've taken a character sprite and placed them behind a screen and in the angled light of windows. I want them to be seen through the screen, but I don't want any value variation on the silhouette there, so I make a copy of the ViewFrame with dynamic sprite, crop it down to the dimensions of the screen, put it on a room overlay and then recolour it. For the angled light effect, I take the same ViewFrame onto a dynamic sprite, recolor it, draw some black lines over the top of it using the DynamicSprite's drawing surface, then set this to a room overlay's sprite and set the blend mode to Add. Because additive blending mode doesn't do anything with black, only the orange recoloured parts show up, and we get a nice, dynamic angled lighting effect that reacts to the player's positioning.

If this is too specific or not easily possible, not a problem, but I figure it's worth asking! I do this kind of thing all the time in making pre-rendered VFX and it would be very nice to start to be able to do this at runtime more easily.

Forgive me if this is already on the roadmap or already exists but I searched the forum, manual and autocomplete suggestions and couldn't find it!

It's very convenient to be able to rotate overlays without having to pass them through a dynamic sprite first, and it would be similarly useful to have an individual flip operation for overlays, similar to how the dynamic sprite flip works. Easy enough to work around by using a dynamic sprite, but having this functionality built in would be a nice little bonus.

I've just started using a dynamic sprite in my project, and when running a build and then closing it, the warnings log displays this:

"Game : (room:6)[R 758] Dynamic sprite 777 was never deleted"

Is there a point that I *need* to delete a dynamic sprite? It displays a GUI element and I plan to use this from the start of the game to the finish. But this warning makes me wonder if I should delete it on exiting the game or something?

After over a decade working on other people's projects I have finally begun working on a new game of my own conception and design. I thought it would be interesting for people to see what obstacles I come up against, how I'm approaching things and what I learn along the way, so I have started doing some development logs over on my trusty old blog. I'll link them here in case anybody here is interested:

Devlog 1 - Assessment of the situation and initial thoughts

Devlog 2 - Very first steps of writing code and trying to prototype design ideas

Devlog 3 - Relearning how to use the AGS editor.

Devlog 4 - AGS is my friend again

Devlog 5 - Getting it right.

Devlog 6 - Occam's Razer

Devlog 7 - Late to the party

Devlog 8 - Putting it to the test.

Devlog 9 - Taking direction.

Devlog 10 - Progress, again.

Devlog 11 - Systems!

Devlog 12 - Dynamics

Devlog 13 - Nobody will ever grasp exactly how much effort I have put into getting the tiniest things feeling good.

Devlog 14 - Coming together

Devlog 15 - I'm a writer now.

Devlog 16 - Production!!

Devlog 17 - Preview

Devlog 18 - One month of production

[Deadline]

Underground

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/6pg2ygb.png[/imgzoom]

For this competition, I want you do draw an underground scene - whether it's a cave, tunnel, subway, sewer, basement, or anything that can be considered under some sort of ground.


Deadline is 9th of May, 2017!

Voting system:
Concept: try to be creative and unique and tell us a visual story
Playability: remember to pay attention to walkable areas, possible hotspots and exit points
Artistic Execution: a little extra effort and polish makes a world of difference

Happy drawing! 

Hello again! I've done another post about adventure game art - this time about atmospheric perspective in adventure game scenery! Enjoy

Hello! I've written another blog post about adventure game art, this time about foreground objects in adventure game scenery.

Hello! I'm still blogging away about art in adventure games - this time, looking at camera angles. I'll be writing about high camera angles soon, so stay tuned for that too!

Update: now I've looked at high camera angles too!

Hi fellow AGSers!

I wrote some blog posts about adventure game art, this time examining the use of traditional complementary palettes in scenery!

Red-green!

Yellow-purple! 

Orange-blue!   

Hey all! I wrote a post about form and silhouettes in art, and the power they can have!

Here's the link!

I recently cleaned up my old blog, getting rid of the old posts, and with them the spam, virus warnings and outdated stuff. Today I put up an essay I've been putting together about how I've changed my approach to using perspective when drawing background for games, and I figure some of you may be interested.

Here's the link to the post!

Hello!



I decided a few days ago to finally seriously focus on learning high res animation each night after work. Thus, I did, and have a small one room fully playable prototype game to show for my efforts. It's finishable!

What I'm mostly interested in is feedback about the animation style. The rest of the game is just stuff I quickly threw together - my intent was to see if I could create a game that's fully playable with high res animations, because I think animating a character is one thing, but being able to use the animations in a game is another thing entirely, and a super important part of the process.

Anyway, yes, enough blathering, if you'd like to check it out the link is here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qrnklj6x54c524q/Dooooot%20Prototype.zip

All feedback appreciated, as always!

I saw this tonight, grabbed it, have spent a couple hours with it and am surprised at how lovely it is. It's a new point and click adventure with a lot of charm, some weird puzzles (although they've been very satisfying to solve for me personally, so far) and delightful graphics. Special introductory price on both Steam and GOG, of course, and a 1.3GB download. Will post more thoughts when I've completed it.

Here's a cute, bizarre and unique looking low-res adventure game that I just backed.

Cat - not sure if I'm allowed, but if Andail allows it, then that title graphic would be very handy indeed

Step 1: Gathering references.



Step 2: Sketch!

Hello

The last illustration workshop was great fun. Tons of great entries, stuff to learn from and energetic discussion about drawing techniques and ideas. It's been 2 months or so since we did one, and I'd really like to see another one happening sooner rather than later. The saccharine lure of the joy at being part of a group of people all working on creations with the common goal of improving and learning is too tempting for my creative sweet tooth. So, this raises a number of questions:

1. Are people ready for another one? Is it a bad time of year to be holding such an event? Will most people be able to find time in 3 weeks to do another piece again?
2. Is Andail willing to run another one of these workshops for us?
3. Is there a topic we'd like to cover? I know portraits were mentioned last time, and I am personally in favour of a portrait focused illustration workshop, but would also welcome a workshop on, well, basically anything.

Interested to hear thoughts!

I love game art - especially DOS era VGA art. Love it - not just because it's the stuff closest to my own, but also because I just love the way those big pixels look.

When I play games - almost any games - I find myself taking as many screenshots as possible of stuff that inspires me stylistically. I'm a compulsive screenshotter; I'll quite happily play a bit over and over just to get the screenshot I want. One day I was looking at all my lovely screenshots and feeling sad that nobody else could see them and how beautiful they are, so I decided to start a tumblr page dedicated to posting just screenshots of just DOS games. Thus, I put up what DOS screenshots I had at the time, and have since been on an amazing journey of playing as many pretty DOS games as I can find, and posting them on my tumblr. It's a weird mix of stuff I grew up playing as a kid, stuff I'd heard of but never gotten a chance to play, stuff GOG has put out that interests me and weird stuff I've found while browsing ebay at 2am instead of sleeping, and I've got everything from Doom to Dominus up there. 5 screenshots each, any genre, as long as it's DOS.

Anyway, enough ranting. Here's the little online art museum I curate: http://dos-ist-gut.tumblr.com/. Feel free to recommend more games but be aware that I've got a *ton* of DOS games on my shelf I haven't put up there yet.

Hello

For this background blitz, I want you to draw something that is, in some way, extreme. Extreme close up, extremely cold, whatever, as long as it is extreme.

Scenes must be AGS compatible. No further restrictions apply. You have until the 10th of June!

Happy drawing!

For this BG blitz, I want you to focus on frozen water. Your scene can be a snowy street, a cave in the tundra, a research station amongst a chilly glacier, or perhaps something a bit more out there like a sno-cone stall or a cryogenics lab. Whatever you do, make it icy!

Entries should fit within AGS constraints, other than this there are no restrictions.

Voting will start the 19th of December.

Happy drawing!