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This is a more of a moral support thing comment:
past few days I've been working on the competition entry for Background challenge (frozen water theme) and I am also very much more comfortable with drawing outlines (and the scene I'm doing is with loads of shades of white and blue basically) and it's really hard for me to switch into that "mode". My mind knows what I want it to look like but keep struggling with the number of shades I'm using.

As Daniel said, I think it is a matter of working with high enough contrast between colors that is the trick. For example shadows make a good outline tool, they give shape but also indicate where an object ends without a separate outline.

Btw by responses, Squinky, I hope you didn't get the wrong idea about your drawings, as far as I'm concerned the usage of outlines was not the problem, but the fact that they were (they're look really good to me now) a tad too thick and formed shapes of their own and so overpowered the shapes they were supposed to surround. The digital painting you posted is a lower level of those backgrounds, even though it too has some good aspects.

I've not actually checked this but it sounds plausible - the whole song is actually making fun of people...in Gangam, which is apparently a posh neighbourhood in Seoul (and where he lives/use to live). I watched the video but didn't really notice this 'till I heard this (I thought it was just weird Eastern humor thing and besides I don't really know what he is saying at certain points) and for instance he's trying to be "gangsta" but is actually on the toilet etc.

The guy actually went to Berklee, so in the end a song that was supposed to be making fun of the pop culture products of J-pop and such, became a pop product itself...things turn out funny that way I guess.

...anyway, looks nice, carry on.

Looks really nice so far.
Only 2 things I notice
- the girl has a bit of messed up hands, especially for concept you might want to keep the hands not covering the body and the shoulders just a tad wider (they should be just a bit narrower than her hips, but this might be a bit too much, unless you want to make it a caricature, in that case you might make the difference a bit bigger)
- you need to lower the boot top a bit on the guy, determine where the knee is and make the top of the boot lower than that. The way this is now looks almost ok, but the animation will look weird

There are three men - Grandfather, father and son. The father is both a father to the son and a son to the grandfather.

Is it Bob Wilson or the Bartender?

To date I don't think anyone has done multiple endings properly, the main problem is that the game always tells you there will be multiple endings so you're worried about what you're going to get the entire time of playing. If you're going for a moral choice system to decide the endings do it right, just put it in based on what the player chooses to say, never tell the player he's choosing right or wrong. As Trapezoid said the ending has to actually feel like the only ending. Heavy Rain did multiple endings really well, but it still had the thing of, you knew there were multiple endings, they didn't tell you if the choices you make were going to be right or wrong like Mass Effect, but you still worried about what you were doing.

Indeed.
Personally hate multiple endings...makes me feel like I didn't see all I could.

It's how you put it in. Say you integrate a system which, if you decide to solve puzzles the violent way (you brake a lock instead of "borrowing" a key, you  threaten a person instead of pleading/doing them a favour etc.), you get a certain number of points in a certain category. If you've chosen the "violent way" of solving puzzles (or it outweighs the non-violent times you solved a puzzle), when in the ending puzzle you have in your inventory a gun or a knife you can use them on the bad guy to wound/kill/hurt. On the other hand, if you've chosen the less violent way of solving puzzles, you won't be able to use the gun to kill, you have talk your way out or get into a fist fight. That might cause the death of the love interest of something, if you fail, but it might not.
That's like 3 different endings with a gameplay that player customed to his playstyle without even knowing it. It doesn't have to be a major issue, maybe a 20-30% of the puzzles can be solved in two different ways, that's probably enough.

I hate the the Blade Runner approach to endings because a bit too much depended on certain actions and I really had no idea of what I was actually doing (like what choices you did to make yourself a replicant, that's really on the whim of the game makers). It really should be a proper reflection of players actions where their personality/gameplay is reflected.

I'd change back to non-gradient skies and maybe add in some nice white fluffy clouds instead. Gradient seem kind of out place when everything else is not gradiented (or at least not so obviously) and it kind of clashes with the overall style (not much, but it does.

I'd make the lines a bit thinner on everything and I think you messed up the perspective on the first two images.
Don't know what's with the blurriness.

As for the realism, I never did intend to learn how to make anything look realistic. Since the stuff I needed to learn Maya for are small cartoony objects. But once I started making the stapler, that's when I decided I may as well put this time to good use by actually trying to make something look realistic.. of course though I half failed. The HDRI map is a brilliant idea. I was also tempted to make one of those bump map textures (no idea what they're called) that help make scratches and such look real. Where it allows the light to bounce off depending on the gradient of the bump map.. or some such magic.

Remember to use the ink and paint material (you can get an outline on objects without post process).

Bump maps - black and white textures (can also be height maps for terrain, but that's not really texturing) - use them for scratches and stuff like wooden and tiled floors, bricks etc., they give just a bit of detail to surfaces - you for example adda bump map that'll show the name of the manufacturer on that staple and in the render it would sort of "pop up" - gray is flat, black is indented, white pops up.
Displace maps/normal maps (you'll find different terminology) - can be b&w images but usually people are talking about those purplish textures, they're mostly made out of using 2 different models (one that is more detailed than the other) and what you do is basically is a shell from the one with the higher number of polygons (details) on the model with less polygons (simpler one).
Main difference - bump maps have 2 colors (1 less than normal maps) and they're for smaller details (scratches for instance) and you don't actually change geometry when it renders, while normal maps actually make stuff, as in the details actually cast shadows on the world etc.
My advice is to try both with letters on a flat planes then maybe a cube with a brick texture to see how they work.

Wadjet strikes Steam again! Congrats.

Looks very polished and judging from the team it really can't be bad.

Strange game, not bad.

That's pretty good for "I don't know how to make a cube" + couple of hours of youtube videos = a finished model.
For a chrome type of metal, those materials are not determined by their color (except when it's gold, brass etc.) but by reflection (they're mirrors basically). Also a good detail for realism is a hdri map, it just makes it a notch better. If you're working with mental ray renderer, there are sites like this http://www.mrmaterials.com/

(btw you can get Max, and even Maya I think, with a 6 month license if you're unemployed or a student legit from Autodesk)

If you're going from scratch, you probably should've gone with Blender though.

It's a good concept but poor execution. I tried it and hated it, here's why:
- install is bloody big, but ok
- network lag is bad but even without that the game is horribly optimized and FPS doesn't go down even on the lowest settings (my friend says it's a bit better actually if you put the settings on medium instead of lowest, but I think that's weird). And it's relatively ok when you're running across terrain, but if there's 20 people around you, it's unplayable and a slideshow.
- terrain is big, but that actually causes 2 major problems - you have a relatively small amount of ammo (especially if you're antitank) and you take long trips to where the action usually is - which is a really weird design
- once a team is armoured, you're basically f-ed - if a faction has a lot of vehicles and the other doesn't - they're screwed since ammo is scarce and if you miss a tank
- game is unstable as hell - first few times the game just shut down in the menu without notice, couple of times I set everything up and then the play button doesn't appear

[y=(0.5 * cos(4/pi*x)) + 0.5]

*rant*I hated my math teachers (the one in grammar school was basically eyeing the girls and the one in college would make it all seem clear in class but when you got home it dawns on you that you don't understand anything) and my music teachers - the one in elementary school was drunk 90% of the class and the one in grammar school was teaching advanced stuff along with dictating every detail of a composers lives which was mostly irrelevant to music). It was mostly me being uninterested in math and music theory, but they're the ones that kept it uninteresting.
*/rant*

So anyway, I suck at math, but wouldn't you need a cosinus curve y=cos2x (that way it has the value of y=0 when x=pi/2). Now to get all the values positive, you cut y in half y=0.5cos2x (you make the amplitude half so it goes from +0.5 to -0.5)  and then add 0.5 to make it all postive so y=(0.5 cos 2x) + 0.5

That'll make it so when x=pi/2 y=0, but we need x=1 and y=0 so maybe we multiply x with 2/pi so in the end it should be y=(0.5 * cos(4/pi*x)) + 0.5
I'm sure somebody is better at math than moi, but it does feel good to get the brain working a bit.

Well they say they'll have a protoype video soon, so all will be revealed...probably. In the descriptions there's lots of gameplay elements mentioned and I just kind of doubt it'll all fit in.
I only saw gameplays of the older Dizzy games, and the twins mention it themselves - it's basically very simple fetch quests, so I don't really have any nostalgia glasses for this.

It is a platform-based adventure game.

*Dusts hands*

Freak. We use to hang people for words like these.  Still, I think the main problem might be that "adventure" is not really a genre now days, even in places such as AGS forums, it's more of a slang.

Since the rest of the site uses pixelarty images, I'd change that smooth gradient into a dithered one. Also, when you get comfortable with basics of html, I suggest going for Wordpress and the big selection of free pre-made themes, with some basic understanding of html, css and php, which I'm sure would take you a day or two (actually you just have to understand what the code is about and modify it slightly). You'll get a blog type of site, that you can modify easily with news etc.

I suggest http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp as a really quick way to find what you want to do and modify on your page, it's a cheat sheet but with explanations (it's got HTML, CSS and Javascript/PHP instructions with great practical examples).

I agree with said background solution, it's better to use a smaller image that's 1-5px wide and then repeating it, it's not that important for users with fast connections, but it's better overall impression if it loads fast anywhere, it takes up less bandwidth and it's the professional way of doing it.
So make a transition in the image from black to blue and then make the background color blue - that way it'll seem like the image goes on forever downwards, but actually you make a rather small image.

Code: css

background-attachment:scroll;
background-color:#rgbrgb;

*pedantic cough*it's actually #rrggbb since the codes are determined in a hexdecimal system from 0-F and so 2 digits (16*16 combinations) gets you the 256 colors you can use for each channel*pedantic cough* 

There's seems to be a mention of Updating Win7 before you Upgrade to Win8:
http://www.gigabyte.com/WebPage/104/step-upgrade.html
http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57479377-285/how-to-prepare-your-pc-for-windows-8/
Did you do all that?

2 things - definitely repackage them, so it's not obvious (different items etc.) and I think it's ok to do it (especially if the game is rather old), but to rely completely on them for a new game, is kind of lazy and shows lack of ambitions.

What MurrayL said. Plus if you're not sure you might want to add instructions, like right click, save as, choose where you want to save the file etc. or just "click here to download".
At least that's how my mom functions - she doesn't get everything (she works on a computer but web surfing and some workings of a computer don't interest her enough to learn more), but she'll read everything (takes her ages to scroll through bigger sites  ). So just be clear, lay the instructions out and they'll read it and do it even if they don't get it.

The thing I think would really control people in this case "do I want to use this up on this person?"

What TZ was all about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button,_Button_(The_Twilight_Zone)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oKSJZAaSyc