Messages

If you the change the spelling, people will just think you can't spell. The way to create exotic speech is to leave the words intact but mess with the grammar. Look at the word order of other languages, and make up a rule or two like always putting an adjective after the noun it modifies, or always putting the verb before the subject, or never using pronouns.

The new perspective corrections look great. There's just one remaining perspective issue. The rightmost bedpost needs to be moved to the right so that the near end of the bed won't look narrower than the far end.

The arms are rather long. I think the hands should appear at least halfway into the frame.

It's an unappealing body type but accurately portrayed as such, so I think we can assume he's not meant to be attractive.

To give people some background here, hating on furries is how adolescent skater-wannabe twitch-gamers with their jeans around their ankles greet each other. They consider it their leet membership card, and bring it up even when it's not relevant to the topic at hand just to make sure everyone knows they're trendy little hateboys.

Excellent. I figured out what's wrong with the back view, though: the exaggerated perspective of the front view has been turned upside down. The feet should be closer to the center when they're further away from you, and vice versa.

I think you should rework your characters so that they are made exclusively of squares. You can make an impressive walk animation if you take a Rayman sort of approach to it.

For four views, only one variable, giving the proportion of vertical to horizontal, is needed. For eight views, it would also be worth including a variable that somehow represents the angular width of the diagonal ranges. For instance, setting it to maximum would show the diagonal walking views most of the time and only show the rectilinear views when the character walks along an exactly vertical or horizontal line.

Your window has a common problem: the world outside doesn't follow the perspective of your house. We should see a horizon cutting somwehere through the middle there, with ground under it.

The vast area of floor implies a high perspective. This is why the window looks like a picture; there is no way the horizon would even be in frame, let alone that low. If you stick a second little wall in the middle of the room with a similar window, what do you see through it? You see the floor. Now, I grant that a solid green rectangle wouldn't look so great either, but to break it up, you could show the tops of some bushes that are right up against the house.

I would really like to put the text in a stationary GUI while running the Lucas-style talking animations. That is, subtitles. I'm playing "Runaway" right now (commercial adventures are alive!) and the subtitles are really working for me. They're easy to read and they don't clutter up the picture.

An alpha channel allows for semi-transparent pixels in an image, so that, for instance, the edges of a character can appear "anti-aliased" with the background.

There is still sort of a consistency issue. The doorway seems to be at a different place on the wall. As you see it in the bedroom, it would be right where the couch is, and revealing the head of the bed (with lamp) when seen from the living room.

One way to fix it: erase the doorway in the bedroom. Instead, show the end of an open door closer to the foreground to indicate there's a doorway just out of frame.

MI1: "How to Get Ahead in Navigating."

And just about everything in the Infocom Hitchiker's Guide, but it was by the man himself and we love him all the more for it.

I think a better way would be to apply the looping room script to a panorama, and walk a boat character around it to simulate rotation, keeping the camera centered on the boat. When the motor is clicked, run the "boat is moving" animation, and if the boat is pointed in the appropriate direction (that is, sitting in the right place on the looping background) you can make an island slowly rise over the horizon (or sink if it's behind you).

I'm not sure how many trial-and-error puzzles there really are. Often, if you've solved a puzzle by trial and error, it means that it was harder to find the real clue or pattern that you were supposed to pick up on and follow than it was to hammer on it like an ape and get lucky. A designer needs to be careful to make the puzzle's defenses secure enough that it's better to seek and find the solution. This is particularly the case with mazes, as it won't even occur to most people to recognize a method or pattern to a navigable maze when they know all they have to do is explore every passage.

I think you should keep the dither on the jeans, have none on the face, and compromise with less dithered area on the jacket. It's a texture thing.

For an outline cloud shape, just make wandering round bumps of randomly varying sizes on top, and leave the bottom mostly flat. If they're good, you should be able to color them green to make a forest on the horizon so that the backyard doesn't look so infinite.

How about an iconic dialogue system? Give the player choices that don't explicitly say what the character is going to say, but hint at it. Perhaps symbols for general subjects, or a selection of emotions. And for each choice there should be times when it's a good idea, and times when it's a bad idea. Like bursting into tears right before torture might end up becoming a full confession, whereas the same choice after torture might be a convincing plea that you don't know anything. There are right and wrong times to be evasive, defiant, obedient, sarcastic, and so on.

Textures and composition are good.
The dashed line doesn't follow the perspective of the road. See how it's in the middle at the far end, but at the near end one lane is twice as wide as the other.

There's no shame in accepting your strengths and weaknesses as they are. If you're that good at everything else, you can make a very good game with really bad art, and it will still clearly be a very good game, even if it's just stickmen and rectangles with labels on them. Then you'll have something you can give to an artist and say, "Here, play this and see if you would like to illustrate it." If someone decides that it's a game worth hitching their star to, all you'll have to do then is reshape the existing game around the artist's pictures and you'll have a finished product.

Equivalent objects that each have one use and are not interchangable. This rock you can throw at a bird, and that rock you can drop in a well. The knife is for cutting the string, the scissors are for opening the envelope. A game designer should always try to be sure that when the character says, "That doesn't make sense," the player doesn't scream at the screen, "Yes it does!!!"