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While StS backdrops were stylish and meticulous, a lot of the sprites were often clumsy and crude - I think the people drinking in the foreground of the bar illustrate that.

If your current sprite doesn't fit in its because it's notably better than the StS characters. As it is, I like the colours of your update, but I did like the stylish highly saturated shadows of the original.

I also feel the original eyes were more expressive, even if theyw ere less like Simon the Sorceror.

The way the leaves are blue when in shadow looks really nice. It looks odd, however, that the trunk doesn't do the same. Might I suggest you create 'warm' trees and 'cold' trees?

I would add bluish shadow to the trunk to create a colder tree, and a warm golden colour for the shadow of the leaves of the warm, sunset tree. By selective use of the trees you could give create different atmospheres / times of day.

I also like the idea of using lots of simple trees and a few more detailed focal points.

I've just remembered that we should thank one of the new trilogy for the worst example of dramatic irony in history. When the Princess and her guard disembark a spacecraft:

"I guess we were wrong. There wasn't anything to worry about after all!"

BOOM!

[Theme: The Great Exhibition]

Theme: The Great Exhibition
Enties should be a character, an object or an inventory item that might have been found at The Great Exhibition of 1851: Fine ladies, Victorian inventions, ragamuffin pickpockets, etc. Take your inspiration from any aspect of the 19th century, an age of upright gentlemen, workhouses, spiritualism and industry.

Guidelines:
Maximum 150x150 pixels, minimum 30x30.
No colour limit, but feel free to apply your own.
Historical accuracy of little-to-no importance.

I've never been a big Star Wars fan, so the third film didn't disappoint me. It didn't really interest me at all, it was quite deeply boring.

It was dull, flat and poorly acted. The potential interesting development of Vader was handled poorly. Key events seemed rushed and many actions felt unmotivated - particularly the death of the princess.

The cinematography was uninspired, and the transitions seemed to be thrown in as self-parody. The visual effects were gaudy and I found the space battles immensely tedious.

Thanks very much! I'll try to come up with a new topic soon...

It is spot on for the distinct style of the first Simon the Sorceror game.

Dr. Scary's observation that the image has no centrepiece make sense, but I feel the background leads the eye off to the right. The only thing that could improve it would be an in-game pan in that direction to see what marvelous vista the character is looking at.

The only thing I'd suggest, beside that, would be re-working the beginnings of the forest in the top-right. The transition from sky to black behind the second-from-right tree-trunk seems too abrupt. Where it is possible to see through the forest, you only have green, and not the blue of the sky.

I think the background colour is so highly saturated that it draws attention away from the logo.

Have a look at this link I found in the Tutorials thread. There's a short section on how backgrounds can make foregrounds look better and worse.:
http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/art_tut.htm

Unless they're absolutely necessary for the plot, I'd get rid of the ape's small legs altogether. Walking on his hands is a great idea, so why give him legs he doesn't need?
I'd simply extend his torso and have him balance on a spherical base, or a point like a spinning top. Without the fiddly legs, it might be easier to get dynamic pendulous swinging into the torso.

I quite like it when characters and backdrops are in distinct styles, like the Warner Brothers' shorts I mentioned in my post above. I guess it's not to everybody's taste but it has a dynamic that I really like. I'm attempting a similar thing for the game I'm working on:



Sorry if this looks like a shameless plug for my game, I assure you I do feel ashamed.

I think you should examine your inventory, DrSnark. If I remember correctly.

I don't think 'sloppy' is fair. In old Warner Brother cartoons the background artists didn't colour inside the lines. They weren't being sloppy, as Helm says it's a matter of style.

While some people might be put off by those thick outlines, they look okay to me. I suspect after a short while you'd forget about them and just start enjoying the atmosphere of the backdrops.

This is the Chimneysweep Princess and her royal consorts.

The concept reminds me of the sitcom sequence from Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head Nor Tail Of It. I loved that sequence, so this sounds like it could be really fun.

The graphics look really good too!

[and]

I'n not sure I agree, perhaps because I haven't played a KQ game, but not just for that reason.

The advantage of a human Roger is that he can be used as a generic walkcycle template. The great advantage of ProgZmax's alien GUI is that it looks nice, but it's so highly stylised that people are unlikely to want to use it.

While the current defaults encourage people to create their own graphics. ProgZ's work would demonstrate AGS's potential, help people create their own player character and encourage people to produce unique graphics.

Thanks Strazer! I guess when my way seemed to work it didn't depend upon variables being altered in more than one room.

I don't want to simply jump on the bandwagon, but:

We assure that if games like these will be published (like Indy 5), 100% people would buy them...

100% of people? The majority of people live on less than $2 a day, they're probably not too concerned with the demise of the SCUMM interface.

I think there are a lot of great adventure games around at the moment, far more than 5 years ago. If you genuinely feel something is missing from current adventure games, then why not make your own? I know of some free software you could use...

I thought I'd forgotten to mention something!

In the global script header, like this to begin with:

int catStat=0;

Then I wondered if this meant that I was setting the int to 0 ever time a new room script was run, so I changed the troublesome variable to say this in the global header:

int catStat;

And I added this in game_start:

catStat=0;

Which didn't seem to help.

I'm sure I must have done something stupid or missed something obvious, but have some variables that aren't behaving.

I can change the variable from 0 to 1 in one room. When I enter any other room it's at 0 again. There is no code anywhere that changes the variable to 0. While I'm still in the room it also shows up as 0 on the status line (which is updated in the global repeatedly_execute) while the character says that it's 1.

This happened with an int variable, so I changed to a bool and it worked. Now I've made a couple more bool varaibles and they're behaving the same way.

I have around 100 Strings, ints and bools in all, have I hit some kind of limit?

I'd appreciate any help you could offer!

I hope I didn't sound like I was questioning your abilities, as ildu suggested I was just interested as to why you often chose characters over backgrounds. Those images look amazing, but it's interesting to me that you find background work more boring. From an outside perspective those backdrops are far from boring!