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I agree with Erwin. The reason it looks right in the first picture and not in the second is that there tends to be more moisture in the air over a body of water.

Those hands are pretty decent. Make the index fingers just a pixel longer, and you're there.

More importantly, I think you should try making the legs longer. On a more cartoony sprite I wouldn't bother saying so, but this is so realistic and well-proportioned in all other aspects that you may as well finish the job. If, on the other hand, you really want to keep him hobbitized, then I think his neck shouldn't be so long.

You need to make another "view" of your character with the loops reversed.

So, you've already got this nice thing that frames speech with a GUI, originally intended for "thoughts." I think it could be used for more than that. I would like to suggest a handy check box, "Use bubbles for all speech." I would use it in all of my games to set speech apart from complex backgrounds and make it easy to read; in my opinion, outline shadow text really doesn't achieve that quite so well at high resolution.

Wow, I've been looking for a good piano-roll program for a while. Ad Lib Visual Composer back in the CGA days was the first and last time I could make music on my own.

Let's clarify the relativity of "intuitive."  To be frank, proper musical notation is a largely nonsensical code; it only fully makes sense to those who learned it in their youth like a native language. To people who can read music, piano-roll seems counterintuitive, because it's not the language they know.

To someone who never took music lessons, piano-roll is far more intuitive: you have pitch on one axis and time on the other. To know how long a note lasts, I don't have to know how whether it's the solid one or the hollow one or the one with the flag or the dot... I just look and see how long it is. And each note has its own place on the scale; one doesn't have to write "this note, but higher" as if the white keys are embarassed that the black keys live in their neighborhood and don't want them mentioned directly. Equidistant pitches are represented as such. On a piano roll I can pick out a melody, then decide I want to move or copy that melody a few keys up or down -- and the visual representation of the melody is the exact same shape at any altitude. For people who think spatially, it's a godsend.

One thing I could suggest is to tone down the woman's lipstick to a more realistic shade. I'm not saying she can't wear orange lipstick, but given the lighting it seems like her lips are made of hot iron and giving off light of their own.

I use non-photo blue pencil and then ink. Scan at a high res as line art (black and white, not greyscale) to get just the ink. It's easier to pop in color with the fill tool at this resolution before you reduce and resample.

I think the thing about that exit is that it's where I wouldn't expect a door to be, unless the room were a big triangle. And the presence of the foreground object sort of knocks down any idea that there's a wall following the bottom edge of the picture. I would suggest something more diagonal coming from the unobstructed corner.

Aside from that, I really like the style.

Brainstorming on Pessi's point, I think an ex-secret agent turned homeless would be totally paranoid. So perhaps he should be habitually sneaking wherever he walks, constantly scanning his environs, and when he stands still it looks like he's ready to bolt for cover at the first sign of trouble (legs apart and slightly bent, arms out, looking over his shoulder).

Company names aren't copyrighted, they're trademarked. You can search databases like http://tess2.uspto.gov/ for existing trademarks to avoid coincidences, and then if you've got the money you can register the business name you choose.

This won't necessarily protect you if a company who thinks they're more important than you wants to sue you into the ground, and in today's legal system nothing will. But you're likely to escape notice as long as you don't call yourself "Apple Microsoftware" or something stupid like that.

If you want to walk around a huge area, I would suggest using a room-looping script that works like the one that comes in the demo, but vertically as well as horizontally. Make a basic tilable background, use variables to keep track of what sector the character is in, and turn objects on and off accordingly. You can make a theoretically infinite playfield this way. Of course, you would have to keep everything within the object limit for one room, but that's a challenge you would have faced with one giant room anyway.

A sort of a "Wait not THAT button-- D'oh. Well, crap."

"You are totally whacked, Ben."
"That's what they said about the man who invented bifocals!"
"Wasn't that you?"
"Oh yeah... I guess they were right."

One of the things I want for Birch L. Zebra is a structure made of blue glass. The current way will probably work out all right for me, since my main character happens to be black and white for the most part.

But I can see where it would make sense for most users to actually combine the colors if possible. It would probably be most common to give the character just a slight tinge of orange in firelight (like Guybrush at the volcano), or blue underwater. I guess you would need a percentage as well as a color in that case.

Have you considered my suggestion? Try rendering it to a background color equal to the chosen shadow color, and then substituting trans-pink for that color.

The key to getting those mountains to obviously be mountains is color. At the moment, even if you realize what they're supposed to be, they look like piles of construction dirt three feet away. A large, very distant object like a mountain has a lot of air between it and your eyes, which gives it a blue tint. The further away it is, the more blue haze there will be. So, if you recolor your mountains a soft blue-grey, they will visually recede into the distance more appropriately.

Another angle on this: Remember antialiased ttf? Chris removed it because dialogue was being shown antialiased with "transparent pink" and there was all this pink junk around the words. But I think if it used black instead of pink, it would probably look like an fairly good outline, behind smooth text to boot. I would ask that the feature be reactivated, modified to use the shadow font color as the assumed background when rendering the antialiased text.

I would bring the curtains inside. Show the curtain hanging below the edge of the window, and at the top of the window put a curtain rod or valance.

This is an excellent game so far, but I must be missing something, because there doesn't seem to be any exit to the outside. I have no place to go but upstairs and downstairs, and I'm reasonably certain I've exhausted my options.

Big Whoop was an inventory item at the end of MI2.

I only hope you're kidding about the talking LeChuck doll, because how would you come up with that if you hadn't seen it?