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Great, thanks for the feedback!

I've done some more characters:

Thanks for the comments! I agree about the washed out colors, but somehow they fit with my backgrounds better. I'm also making heavy use of ambient colors and such, which will hopefully compensate for this a little.

I've decided to do new sprites for my adventure game.

Old Sprites

New sprites:


Old Sprites



Some more character art:


And a walking animation (playing a bit slow):


Do you like those better than the old ones? Anything looking weird in the animation?

Thanks!~

EDIT: Added old sprites as a pic.

Yay, Princess Marian returns, cute as always!
I played the one with the dragon a while back, was that part 4?

Yay, great - a new update! Everything seems to work great for me, haven't encountered any errors or bugs yet, and the idle animation starts immediately after talking now, thanks for fixing that!

Why is it called XP Edition, though? Does it only work on Win XP?

Haha, nevermind... you weren't the only one who said that.
Nobody on the other board said anything when I tried to inquire a bit further, so I decided to ask here, since there's many talented artists around.

I'm just glad to have my own style, after all!

Spoiler

You can change in your cabin. It's at the bottom right, best to use the keyboard to get there, the ship map is pretty hard to navigate with the mouse.

[close]

Yes, but only for backgrounds and line art. Sprites are easier to do with a mouse.

Thanks!
I just didn't want my drawings to look like someone else's style, it's important to me to have my own. I wanted some sort of manga-ish look, but not as big-eyed and uber-cute as some artists do em, it just wouldn't fit the theme of my game.
The sprites are supposed to not look as manga-ish, as a lot of people don't like manga/anime where I come from, and, judging from the comments, I got em right, yay!

jannar85 - I haven't announced the game yet, don't even have a name for it at the moment, so I can't answer the question for now.

James Kay - The dragon will animate, but only talking and a few gestures.

Well, here's what I got done so far:

*game engine finished, which is set up for 2 playable characters. There's a split-up mode, follow mode and single mode, and exchanging items. At some places it's possible to split up through a dialogue, and sometimes it happens automatically if the story demands it.

*4 Animated characters with 4 direction walking and talking, 8 frame walking cycle

*Different 'talk' animations for the kid, some additional animations like 'take' and 'getting up from bed'.

*Story outline, with the story of the first of five chapters completed.

Here are some sprites I'll most likely use in my game:



The girl sprite is older, I think I'll have to re-do her in my new style, she doesn't seem to fit in all that well.

And...




I was told that my drawing style looks like this anime show called 'Dragon Ball Z'. This was a bit of a shock for me, so... do my drawings and sprites really look like that?

Thanks xD
I still don't know quite a few words (such as 'reccilliation'), but I guess I got the basics of the english language down.

Are you gonna post your pic when it's done? I'd love to see it and maybe I could give you some suggestions and pointers, if you want.

Hehe, no problem!

As for the backgrounds - I must have missed you asking me about that, sorry.

Anyway, here's how I do it (assuming you know photoshop basics):

I make them at the same size as they'll appear in the game (some people draw em at double size and shrink em down to 320x240 for better details).

Next thing I do is filling the image with blue, if there's lots of sky around. Then I just use the brush tool with single, solid colors to define basic areas, like meadows and rocks and whatnot.

By the way, I'm use a tablet - not really neccessary, but it helps a lot.

Then I usually give the grass some definition. I use a slightly darker color and smear it about until it seems right. After that I use a smaller smear brush to define grass on those darker colors I've splurted about, and pull up some green where the rocks come out of the ground.
Now you could use a lighter green to make some highlights and define some grassy shapes with those, too.

Then I  give the rocks some shades using the brush tool. I smear those colors around until they have rocky shapes. To do highlights, just draw em with the brush tool and smear em about until they look right. It might take some tinkering with the smear strength if you're using a mouse.

Then i use a really small brush to define outlines of some objects. You can use the smear tool to fix em up if it doesn't look good with just the brush tool.

Trees are done sort of like stones,  just pull lighter and darker shades up and down with the smear tool.

Leaves on trees are a bit tough sometimes. I usually just draw a basic shape with the brush, and draw some highlight and shade dots on those. Then I give the whole thing some leaf-bushy form with the smear tool.

Clouds are easy too - just splurt some white about and smear it around. You could make yellowy highlights which you then smear around if you want, gives it a warmer look than just white.

So, when it comes down to it, it's just choosing nice colors, defining shapes and their shades and highlights which you then smear into form.

I'm sure there are different techniques to do backgrounds, but this works best for me. If you have any questions, ask away!

EDIT - I forgot to mention the last step. When I'm all done, I adjust the contrast, brightness and the color balance, helps a lot with to give it some atmosphere. Then I sharpen the whole picture and fade the sharpen filter 20-40%. After that I switch it to indexed color mode with 160-256 colors, whatever looks best.

Sprite Sheets - I hate to do those, but I've made a sprite sheet of my green guy, because I wanted to give him a lighter skin tone.

Anyway, I've decided not to use any alias at all because many people suggested not to use it. Thanks for all the info though, I really appreciate it!

I'm not sure if it's possible to add functions like those, but you could simply use global integers instead. You can add to em, subtract from em, multiply em and divide em and whatnot, those should do the trick for any kind of RPG stats.

Is this a game where you pick a character at the start and play the game with it or are more characters available to play with during the game?

Thanks for the example, MrColossal. I know how to do this, but I prefer the AGS alias over Mr. Gaussian Blur and that other Photoshop blur.
And it would be annoying for every frame to do. At least, too annoying for lazy me.
I could spend ages on spriting, but then my game would never get done. I've done 4 characters with walking animations in all 4 directions and don't really want to blur em all in photoshop.
That's why I was considering using AGS' alias in the first place. Coz' it's fast and does the job well.

oversizedchicken - I don't understand what you're trying to say. Could you find some other words for me, please? I'm not so good with english because it's not my mother tongue and you used some of them more complicated words there and you used one too many phrases. Sounds like there is some irony in there tho, but i might be wrong, too.

I don't really want to re-edit em in some other paint proggie. Then I'd have less control of the animations and I'd be much slower at making sprites.

Anyway, good point with the 95% looking like poo in crisp mode... the main characters look fine that way - I've tested it, but some side chars are quite jumpy when they're animated.

I guess the only option for me is 100% size and no AA. xD

Ok.

Anti aliasing seems to make the sprites work better with the backgrounds.

Reducing the sprite size to 95% max in the whole game doesn't look so bad when AA is off, but it may be harder to work with. There would be a few jumpy pixels here and there but they don't seem to bother all that much.

If I made em with 95% size max, the player still could turn AA on and off, whatever he prefers. I wonder if it would be worth it, just for AA to be available. Hmm... :3

This works great! Thanks for taking the time to look at it.
I'll just go and continue to work on my game then.

Hooray!~

EDIT - I'm using lucas arts type speech.

I've uploaded a small open sauce version at neole's place (thanks, neole).

When you walk to the right where the bucket is, the character will hit a region which triggers dialogue 10. While they're talking, you can see the object descriptions when you're over something, and you can even call the verb coin. To see it better, you could try do deactivate skipping text with clicks.

But when you try to talk to the bucket using the verb coin, it works fine, even though it uses exactly the same code. I seems to depend on when you call the dialogue. Maybe it queues it differently when called within a region script?

http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/dialogbug.zip

Thanks!~

It seems to depend on where the Rundialog function is placed. I had it under a walk onto region event before, after a cutscene when the player walked onto it, and the guis would run while a dialogue was going on (but only after i clicked one of the dialog options).

Now I tried to set a GlobalInt to 1 when the player walks onto the region and trigger the cutscene and rundialog from repeatedly execute, which seems to work fine.

But I still think this shouldn't be like that... why does this happen, any ideas?