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Well, okay. Maybe it'll still give you some ideas.

[lgm]: I don't think my edit looks japanese/anime-ish. Would you mind explaining why you think it looks that way? Thanks~

stuh: You're better.

Here's a more simple edit:

Hehe, thank you! I'll simply leave them as they are.

Here's a screenshot of the town map:

The part that takes ages is spriting. The sprites are very small (compared to CoF), so it's fairly easy to work with.
Backgrounds... when I have a free day, I can do up to 3 of them and code them in. They're usually only 320x145, that helps very much.

I've been working on this game for about three weeks now.

Beta testing? As soon as the game can be played through completely, I'll probably need beta testers.

While a nice individual touch, I have to admit the excessive greenness bothers me a little...

I better try be careful with green from now on. I'll try to retouch some of the backgrounds to get some other colors into them.

strazer - About the car... when you say proportions, do you mean it looks too big?

Another thing one can do is this, but it's a little harder to work with:

trylle: Not really - I'm a little color blind, so miscolorings will happen a lot throughout the game.

Ashen: Ooh... more typos! Gonna fix them!

Thanks for the comments so far!

[Overview:]

I'm rewriting/redrawing Hero Theorem at the moment. Most backgrounds are going to be replaced and the whole game will be started from scratch.

Overview:

This is the story of a naive police officer clinging to his own morals too much, a 17 year old boy who witnessed a murder and a female psychologist unable to let go of her past. The pasts of those three have something in common and the game revoles about uncovering those connections.

Features/Facts:

-Hero Theorem is a medium size game
-Sports a few science fiction elements
-Features memories in comic book form obtainted throughout the game. These are entirely optional.
-Uses the same interface as Cedric and the Revolution (which in turn used the old Hero Theorem interface) with a few addons.

Random info:

Where does HT take place and what is it about?

Hero Theorem takes place is in a fictional town in Austria, a few years in the future. It touches a few 'modern day' issues such as terrorism and corruption, but also deals with emotional issues like the things people would do out of desperation, hope or greed.

I want to make this a somewhat serious adventure game without using too much cliché's. That said, I must admit that the game also features a bit of an amnesiac story, something a lot of people dislike. However, my game will take this story device and turn it inside-out.

Gameplay Stuff:

The game features memories presented in comic form. Some of these can only be obtained by solving additional puzzles. One of the challenges in the game is getting all those memories. To understand the whole story, it may be neccessary to read trough all of them, but they aren't needed to finish the game. The idea was derived from the vaults one could find in the game Psychonauts.

Later in the game, other characters can be played or will come along. I finished all of their neccessary standard animations (walk & talk in 4 dirs) recently.

Art & Drawings

All my old art is pretty much obsolete now. All the characters have gone through a redesign and the art doesn't apply very much anymore. The same goes for most of the old screenshots. Locations have been changed or removed, etc.

Here's a recent sketch:



Screenshots:




(The game's interface is going to get a visual overhaul as well.)

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Visit http://www.origamihero.com if you want to give my other games a go.
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I made an edit of your sprite:




I added some shading, changed some colors and gave him (or you) a different stance. Hope this helps!

Reptile - your way is a way to make a sprite, but characters like those in, say, Simon the Sorcerer were hand pixelled, no scans and such. Seeing as Zigs is aiming to make something pixelly in low-res, scanning a drawing and drawing over it isn't really neccessary.

Zigs - you could always study other sprites. That really helps a lot.

Fiddle with the sharpen filters in photoshop. If they sharpen your image too much, blend them to 50% or something. That works quite well for me.

I just close my eyes and start to think - music usually only distracts me. Then I bring my... 'vision' or whatever into being with photoshop or my sprite editor, and that's it.

Several scenes in my game came to life that way. Some dialogue, too.

I only got to play Splinter Cell 2 with a crack because the original kept complaining about cd emulation software or something - even after I uninstalled all of those programs.

Being a gamer isn't easy these days anymore.

While you could go and create a fully rendered 3D scene and resize it to lo-res (320x200), you could also create a bigger-than-ingame drawing in photoshop or something and resize it. Drawing small details isn't that much of a problem.

It would still look more natural (more drawing-like) than a 3D rendered scene and it's probably faster, too.

I'd say that for 800x600 and upwards, 3D would be worth considering, because creating drawings for such high resolutions can be quite hard.

I like working with 3D and 2D - I've done stuff in both fields and I love it. DCillusion's idea sounds nice and worth giving a try.

The thing that bothers me about 3D is that a lot of new adventure games try to make stuff look as real as possible instead of exploring new styles.

Oooh... spring break! Too bad we working people don't have breaks anymore.

But I sure do look forward to my mini-holiday in june, because I'll get to hike in the mountains of switzerland (südtirol, glurns) for a few days! And the food's yummy there, too.

There's www.gamingw.net, but I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for. I think it's a rpgmaker2000 (or whatever it's called) community, or something. Maybe you want to give it a try.

I like the scripting part as much as I like making/animating sprites and drawing backgrounds. The only thing I don't like is making music, mostly because I'm just no good at it. But it's fun to go and search the internet for good, usable midis.

Drawing, making adventures (AGS) and platform games (MMF) and listening to music while doing so.

Here's a few things you could try:

-set your desktop to 16 bit
-install updated graphics card drivers
-make sure you have the latest directx stuff installed
-use the letterbox resolution (320x240) instead of 320x200

If nothing works you could run the games in windowed mode, they should at least be playable that way.

EDIT: Oh hey, did someone move this reply? I'm pretty sure I was the first one to comment. Or maybe I'm just goin' cuckoo.

I like reading this magazine.
Wish it had more indie adventure games content, though. All those new games look so samey to me. Guess that 3D stuff they're all so crazy about these days is to blame for that.

Hmm... start msconfig (type it into the run command bar or whatever it's called on english computers). Go to the system startup tab (last one) and deactivate all weird startup programs.
If you have a hard time telling good from bad programs, post a screenshot of your startup list.