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And naturally you'll be kind enough to upload just a patch too. :

Um... I'm not actually sure how I would make a patch. Any tips?

I'm curious, did you use a vector-program like Moho for moving the character's body parts for making the animations? It looks like it, and I wanted to know whether I should congratulate my keen eye or rip it out for lying to me.

Sort of. Perhaps a mild jabbing is in order. The sprites began as vectors in Corel Draw, but I actually animated them as raster images on planes in Blender3D. I thought this would be the quickest way to animate hi-res sprites, of course it turned out to be fraught with complications. I would have used something like Moho if I'd had a copy!

[See first post for mirror download.]

See first post for mirror download.

Thanks for all the positive feedback! I hope the game meets the expectations of those of you who haven't played it yet. For those who have...

Scorposer I'm pleased you're enjoying it so far. M0ds's music is reason enough to play through the game.

Mordalles & Buloght: I'm particularly pleased you enjoyed the dialogue, That was one of the parts I was most uncertain of.

marlamoe: Thanks for the bug reports, I'm very glad you liked the game. I'll get an updated version online at some point - or as soon as anyone finds a really deadly bug!

I'd like to know how long the game takes to finish. It lasts about 45 minutes for me, but I know all the answers. Now lets get on with the harsh criticism. I haven't heard the word 'derivative' used once. Shame on you!

This is a cute background, but I think the fence at the back is too straight. It should curve with the hill. I also think you could reposition your sheep a little to make the composition more interesting.

Here's a badly done gif outlining what I mean:



Having the the sheep overlap the fence breaks up the image a little and will make it more interesting to look at. He doesn't need to be kissing the fence, like he is on my sketch. That's just a mistake.

Woohoo, I can't wait to play this!!Ã, 

You don't have to!

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=30440.0

Moderators, please lock this thread.

Thank you!

[NELLY COOTALOT: Spoonbeaks Ahoy! HD]

NELLY COOTALOT: Spoonbeaks Ahoy! HD

Wishlist on Steam

Plot:
Nelly Cootalot, fearsome pirate and lover of tiny and adorable creatures, is charged by the spirit of a dead buccaneer to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a fleet of birds known as spoonbeaks. Her adventure will bring her face to face with the nefarious Baron Widebeard as she uncovers corruption and wanton punning in the Barony of Meeth.

Background:
Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy! was originally released hundreds of years ago in 2007. The game started out as a birthday present for my girlfriend and got wildly out of hand. In 2016, I made another Nelly game called Nelly Cootalot: The Fowl Fleet. This HD remastering brings the original game back to life, with a streamlined interface, a homemade voice over and loads more pixels.

Screenshots:




Remastered Specs:

• Remastered 1920 x 1080 HD graphics
• Extremely cheap voice acting (in English)
• Windows / Mac OS / Linux
• English, German, French, Spanish & Polish (text only)
• Streamlined point & click interface
• Bad jokes replaced with good jokes (I wish)

Trailer:

Opportunities to:

• Rescue endangered and unusually named wildfowl.
• Acquire morally dubious items on behalf of minor aristocrats.
• Intercept the private correspondances of a daredevil pilot.
• Come to the aid of downtrodden supernatural beings.
• Be confused by Nelly's County Durham colloquialisms.
• Borrow facial hair from long-dead pirates.
• Wantonly misuse the word 'borrow'.

AGS Awards:
Best Game Created with AGS 2007
Best Gameplay 2007
Best Dialogue Writing 2007
Best Player Character 2007
Best Character Art 2007

Music:
By Mark "m0ds" Lovegrove.

Translation:
Polish Translation: Krzysztof 'Elum' PaŠ,ka.
German Translation: Marcel Weyers with Tante Tabata, Kat Wallisch and Björn Ludwig.
French Translation: Hervé Appriou (Surdy), Mathieu Bergounioux (Monsieur OUXX) and Marc Denizot
Spanish Translation: Ernesto and Ana of Kawagames.

Walkthrough:
A walkthrough is available at gamesolutions HERE.

Thanks to Applications Systems Heidelberg, the Beta Testers, Translators and all the other people who helped make this game.

Download old version:
Nelly Cootalot v1.8 (24mb)

Essentially, it's a "genre pastiche" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I think that's a risky idea. Buffy the Vampire Slayer already had strong elements of pastiche and spoof. You can't spoof a spoof, or rather, I don't think it's wise. If a spoof remains the same genre as it's target, what's the world coming to?

I think you could take the concept of your gameplay, which sounds fun, and relocate it a little. If you're interested in horror pastiche, set it in a small-town picture house, or a motel, or an isolated village full of creepy characters. thn you'd have the opportunity to put your spin on classic horror conventions. If you stick with a Buffy spoof, you'll be putting your spin on Joss Whedon's spin on horror conventions. That's less spinny.

I hope that doesn't sound too negative. There are popular spooves of spooves, I just object to them. Feel free to disregard my criticism entirely.

This is really nice! I love the sink, it reminds me of SQ6. However, the wobbly black border isn't inkeeping with the clean lines of the backdrop. I'd get make them more rigid, perhaps in the shape of plumbing, or get rid of them altogether.

So are you definitely sure this happens with the speech from the dialog script, and it's not some custom Character.Say/SayAt call from the script (ex: in dialog_request) ?

This definitely occurs with dialogue from the dialog script, written after this fashion: 'EGO: Hello!'. I haven't noticed it happen from any cEgo.Say style commands, but I'm not certain it doesn't/

Hmm, so do you mean the very same speech message may display fine the other moment you try, while a talking character is standing at the same room coordinates?

Yes. In fact if you choose the same dialogue option again, the line that appeared in the wrong place will often appear in the right place. This is what makes me think I'm not clever enough to work out the cause.

My game is very nearly complete, and this is the biggest outstanding 'bug'. Since it doesn't hamper gameplay, I guess I'll release the game as it is. When I do release the game, I'll also upload the font I used too, in case that's to blame in some way. I'll update this thread with a link at the appropriate time.

Thanks for your help.

I want to know if there is any program which lets you make readymade character sprites in an easy way.

I am talking about GOOD QUALITY HUMAN characters...

You can't demand easy and good, I'm afraid it's one or the other. I don't know of anyone providing a good range of readymade sprites. Luckily, there's some free software about that will make the difficult and time consuming process of producing good animations quicker and easi-er.

SSH's walkcycle generator:
http://americangirlscouts.org/bbc.com/yabb/index.php?topic=26501.0

MakeHuman (like a poor man's Poser, generates 3D human figures very quickly):
http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=150931

Blender3D (fully featured 3D software you could use to animate MakeHuman models:
http://www.blender.org/

Inkscape (Vector based drawing application, could be used in conjunction with blender for a 2D homestar runner-y effect).
http://www.inkscape.org/

If you click the link in my signature you'll see the game I'm working on. I used software like Inkscape (actually CorelDraw) to draw the parts of the characters and then animated them in Blender. This meant I didn't have to re-draw the character every frame, so it saved time. In many ways though it was more compliated than simply drawing.

I like this, but I have a few suggestions:

The distant hills are very sharp, but the boat in the foreground is rather soft. I guess the speedboat is a photograph. You could try softening the background image, without significantly blurring, to help them blend.

You could add aerial perspective to help the scene look a little more realistic. That would mean subtly tinting areas a pale blue the further away they are from the camera. Terragen may have a mist feature that would create the same effect.

I like the orange, but the saturation is very high and the image is almost monochrome. I don't think you should throw any more colours at the image, but you could lower the saturation of the higher tones.

[EDIT:]

Your evidence is compelling. I'm not on my home computer, so I can't check but I'm almost certain that the variable mentioned on that page:

game.max_speech_width

Is present in AGS 2.72 and sets speech width. I've changed it on a number of occasions and it alters the way regular LEC speech displays, not Thinks. Is it possible that the Tracker hasn't been updated?

I need to go and check if I'm talking nonsense.

EDIT: I am talking nonsense! I must have emperor's-new-clothes-ed myself into thinking I saw a change in the dialogue width when I changed that variable. That's a pity, I thought it would help solve the problem.

It's a game.variable. I always find that section of the help file hardest to locate.

I'm afraid I'm using the standard AGS dialogue editor. I should have mentioned before that my game is at 640 x 480 resolution. I've never experienced this problem at lower resolution, but I think it may have happened with other fonts. I also don't think it ever happens outside of dialogues, but none of the characters it happens to say a great many things through script commands, so I'm uncertain.

Sorry to be so vague!

This is a problem I've had for a while: from time to time characters' dialogue appears in the wrong place. I'm using Lucas Arts style speech, and instead of appearing above characters' heads, the odd line will appear in the middle of the sprite. This happens more often if the character is near the edge of the screen and less often if I make the speech width wider, but it does still happen. I must stress that this only happens occasionally, not with every line.

I'm using a custom SCI font I made using Radiant Font edit. Could it be that my font has dimensions that AGS doesn't like? Any help would be appreciated.

I know you asked for criticism on his stance, but I'd like to make a couple of suggestions regarding his face. To me, it looks a little too aristocratic for guybrush, the overbite and narrow jaw in particular seeming not quite right.



Here are a couple of alternatives that I think have a bit more of a guybrushy feel. They're rough, but I tried to stay within your style and pitch it somewhere between SMI and CMI. I think the softer features are more inkeeping with a young would-be pirate. I've also turned his head a little towards the viewer because I think it fits better with his stance.

I hope that this unsolicited facial criticism is useful. I think it's a very nice sprite, I particularly like the hair, and the colours are very well chosen.

6th) Dialog works great but could it be NoBlock inherantly? This would allow for stuff to happen while talking is happening.Ã,  Animation in the background, CEgo. moving... stuff.Ã,  Dialogs are interesting but I don't know if they hold the audience interest long enough.

This is definitely a note from me...
What I have found in live theater, is that the audience is more attuned to television, which means more stuff has to happen in a relatively short period of time. I should think this would hold true for the gaming industry as well... I guess we need more stuff.

I don't endorse pandering to short attention spans, but I think an easy way to integrate 'acting' into dialogue would be very handy. I suppose that this Tracker entry is probably what I'm wanting. Short of that, having access to a few key functions, including Walk, from within the dialogue script would save a lot of dialog-requests.

This regulation doesn't go far enough! I say bring back the Hays code. Ban double beds, toilets and the word "gawd" from hollywood films. Think of the children!

The Shivah has Jews in?!

Ahem. Congratulations! It's great that people outside of the AGS community appreciate the depth of character your games offer. I haven't yet played any of your talkies, but even without voices your characters are some of the best 'actors' I've seen in games.

I'll upload the .OGG as soon as I get the opportunity.
The ambient sounds are different, I'll experiment with changing them around.

Can you post the code where you play it? Sounds like you keep playing it over itself by mistake...

That does sound like the kind of thing I would do and not realise, however, it works properly with a .WAV, so I don't think it could be that. I'll post the code when I get the chance all the same.

Thanks for the help, I'll get back to you with something useful next time I'm not on a library computer!

Thanks. I had clicked set smooth on the wall and the couch which had messed it up so I just had to click set solid and using ambient lighting worked as well.

I think you should adjust the threshold in the auto smooth box.  Making it higher will smooth out the angular looking bit of the cushions. You could also add a sub-surf modifier in the modifier stack. That will make the mesh more detailed when you render, without actually making the mesh more complex.