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Thanks, selmiak! Glad you like it!

No visual update this time (boo, I know!) Made some talking animations for Gabe and Francis the other day. It was a lot harder to make them look good than I thought, thankfully I found some Fate of Atlantis sprite sheets and drew inspiration from their talking anims. Gabe's turned out pretty good, looked good in-game too, but I'll probably redo Francis' as his looked a bit.. awkward, to best describe it.

That's all for now, I'll drop in for another update when I feel I have enough to report, as usual. In the meantime, any comments are welcome, of course!

Glad to hear it, nihilyst!

I've been making more progress the last few days, finished some animations, re-drew the walkables and such for a couple of scenes, tweaked some cutscenes.
If anyone's interested in more visual proof of progress, here's the finished version of Gabe's walk cycle, which I posted a sneak peek of a couple of posts back.

Until next time, keep on adventuring!

Hey there, fellow adventure fanatics! Bet you're surprised to see this back at the first page of threads, if you even remember this little game.

Well, as a veteran forumite/lurker, I know better than to necropost without a good purpose. I'm stopping by here again to let you all know that this game has not died. It's been alive and well the whole time. Well, save for the fact that I haven't had a lot of time to work on it when school started again last year. I did manage to squeeze in a few hours for MBTK every now and then though, so I thought I'd let you all in on what's been going on.

Most of the work done on this project since last summer was in the form of polishing the dialogue and tinkering with existing backgrounds to make them look prettier. Aside from that, the only proper update the game received was a side walk cycle for detective Francis, which you might've already seen if you follow my updates on Twitter or my website. Here it is, for anyone who hasn't seen it yet!

Since a few weeks back however, I've managed to get more proper work done on MBTK, like rendering the new backgrounds for more of the scenes, redrawing the walkables, hotspots and whatnot accordingly, since I've tinkered with the render camera for the scenes as well.

To prove that this is just not vaporware-talk, here's a couple of screens of familiar scenes, and some render previews of some of the more recent scenes.




A-and a final bonus, a frame-peek at Gabe's walk cycle, which I started today/tonight:


That's all for now, hope you all enjoyed the update!

When there's only one candidate, there's only one choice.

Thank you, ProgZ, for your great entry, and congratulations for winning this round of Sprite Jammery!
Not only have you won the contest, but you get to host the next one too!
See you all next Jam..!

Yay, an entry!
Nice work as always, ProgZmax! Let's hope this kick starts a round of awesome entries (we wouldn't want the Sprite Jam to wither away, now would we?)

[SPRITE JAM!]

Welcome, forumites and forumettes, to the brand new SPRITE JAM!

"What's the theme this time around, mr host-man CoffeeBob?", you might ask. Well, I was getting to that!
The theme for this round of sprite jammery is:

Your role-model, spritified as your favorite video game hero/villain (or vice versa!)

That's right! You take one cup of role-model, mix it with a cup of a favorite video game character, and presto! You have a combination of the two, the best of both worlds!
The theme can be applied in both directions, so to say. You could, for instance, take George Harrison and put him in the shoes of Guybrush, or you could dress up Marcus Fenix as Shigieru Miyamoto. Whichever way works best for you!

Other than that, there are no limitations to the theme. You may draw your mashup character low-res using 'only' the colours of the C64 palette if you like, or you may go full HD 3D-sculpting crazy! The only requirement is that it would qualify as a sprite, i.e. be usable in, for instance, the AGS engine.

You have the generous time of two weeks to come up with an idea and craft it. So, without further ado, let the games begin!

I'm riding with Zelda, and I got to steal/borrow Link's sword and clothes? Awesome!
And I won the comp, yay! Shame there weren't more entries, but I get to save the princess so I won't complain.
Also, that's a very cool winning sprite. Did you make it from scratch, Amélie?

I'll get around to hosting the new comp in a few minutes. Hopefully it'll be a theme that hasn't been done before, I'm thinking it might result in some interesting entries.
Thanks for hosting, Amélie! Let's hope there'll be more entries in the next jam. Until then..! *rides away on Epona*

Well, I finished up a little something. Thought it'd be a shame if no one entered the comp, it was a pretty cool theme.


That's me, on a flying NES controller. Looking all happy and stuff.
I'd say it quite simply symbolizes my love for video games, and how my ambition to become a great game designer carries me forward through life. I live to create (and to play games too, of course. ) The pixellized style and the controller represent my special fondness for what is now considered retro games, the games of the older era that sparked my initial interest in the media.
The style is very inspired by the one Paul Robertson used for the Scott Pilgrim game on Xbox Live Arcade/PSN, which by the way is an awesome beat-em-up game.

That's about it for my entry. Hope to see more before the deadline arrives tomorrow.

This does sound like a fun theme, and I might have an idea for it. I'll see what I can come up with.

I promise the winner a kiss (if male)

Well, colour me intrigued!

Hello duders (and dudettes)!

I bringeth you, dear AGS community, proper screenshots!


Still work in progress, but at least some progress has been made. Hooray!

Also, I wrote a little blog post on my website today, in which I explain a bit about the process behind making the background art for this game. Check it out if you're interested (and comment on it, if you like.)
You can find it here; click me!

Thanks for the tips, anian. I found a few cozy songs from She & Him on Spotify, gonna check out the ones that you mentioned too.

Zooey Deschanel is indeed gorgeous, very much so.
I tried listening to some of her music too, but I didn't really like it. But, since she is so gorgeous, I'll give it another chance right now and listen to a few songs. Any recommendations, monkey?

Speaking of monkey, Andy Serkis does an awesome job playing Monkey in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. It's a very lovely game, seems to have gotten its price reduced lately too. If you like colorful, post-apocalyptic scenery and fighting with badass sticks, I'd recommend buying it. Now!

So far it seems like a pretty neat service. Borrowing a bit from Fb and Twitter, adding a bit here and there, giving it a Google-ish touch. I like it.

It's a bit empty though. Not that I miss the mess that Facebook is what with all the friends posting and bands announcing new events, but a little more activity would be nice.
So if anyone wants to add me, feel free to do so. You can find me by my name, Marcus Svensson, but since it's pretty common I think searching for CoffeeBob should work as well.

This game is looking great, has a very cozy style to it and the plot sounds fun and interesting. It's a shame I don't have time to sign up for beta testing, but it looks like it'll be worth it to wait for the final release.

Thank you very much, kind sir Stupot(+).

Very much looking forward to this. I've got a few Ben Jordan games to catch up with before this is released.

Also, those animations really are hypnotic. And awesome! Great work, man.

G+ does sound interesting. Kind of like Facebook, but fresh and new. Also, the fact that it's not Fb makes it a lot more intriguing. 
Right now, most of my activity on Fb consists of 'liking' silly posts and posting silly comments on silly posts...

Like Stupot said, it would be great to at least try to use G+ more maturely, but I'd have to have an account to even try first.
So, if anyone has an invite lying around.. (Send it to vohaulthreepwood@gmail.com, plzkthx)?

SuperDre: Thanks a lot, dude! I'll take that into consideration. So far they've been blending in pretty well with the environment, I'll try to post some proper screenshots soon with the new backgrounds so that you guys can judge for yourselves.

cianty: I see what you mean. I might skip the ambient occlusion for the indoor scenes, since it almost adds too much depth for the scenes, when combined with the simpler character sprites.
Like I mentioned above, I'll try to get some screenshots up on the boards to let you guys see how it all looks together, perhaps in the critic's lounge so that I can get some general feedback on the bg's too.

Sughly: Thank you very much, dude!

No visual update just yet, but I've finished up another two backgrounds for the game. They might need some additional polishing, but they're both pretty close to final. Look out for some proper screenshots, hopefully soon... -ish.

Cianty: Heh, indeed it was.

Here's another little visual update. I finished up the new version of the interrogation room and adjusted the apartment scene some (just a few subtle changes like ambient occlusion and some discrete glow around the lights.)

The interrogation room might look a bit less complex than the apartment scene, but it took a whole 4 and a half hours to render (lots of reflections, increased filtering to make the bricks less blurred, etc.)
Not a lot else to add. I'll work on touching up the rest of the scenes as I get home from work during the week. The game is making progress, slowly but steadily.

cianty: Thanks man! Took a good fifteen minutes to render that tiny scene, it sure was worth it.

Ha ha, 15 minutes? Awesome.  :o It definately was worth it!

Looks like I was mistaken, it was the higher res render that took 15 minutes. The pictured render 'only' took six minutes.