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Love the backgrounds and really like the experimenting you are doing with all the different genres. It's like a game packed with all the games I played as a kid

Great podca(s)ts!
Looking forward to see some of you guys' high res art and what you think about the production time going from low-res to high-res.


Maybe all of us Swedish Adventure devs could get together some time, maybe play each others games and hack them to pieces (as in test play and give feedback)

Music, one of those areas I'm not touching! I would say that the first  'Dark Forces' was the first game where I really felt music made a huge impact on immersion. I would have to admit that when I was young and played MI2 I didn't notice the iMuse usage (maybe because it was so well executed so it felt seamlessly and didn't distract).

Not all of us have Swedish sounding names, Grundislav!

Sounded like it was a pretty awesome time

Yea, I would say about the opposite for me (I didn't keep open office loaded in the systray/background though). Opening a document in Libre takes around 1-2 secs. And it doesn't stay loaded stand by - so just feels clean, simple and fast
Realize it's getting off topic.

Great episode! I agree with everything Ben mentioned really, it does make life much easier.
I had the same opinion about Open Office being slow, but I had not been looking for an alternative - Installed Libra office now and seems to work great so far

Nice to finally see the trailer, Phil! Nice work

You guys! That made we super motivated and it's great to hear people are still looking forward to our project.
Oh, but the pressure, now I need to go back and redo all the art
But hopefully we can give some news about the project soon.

Interesting talk, I agree on many things about the feedback, but some different view on how far to go. But I'll leave that to a PM.

Great as always! Enjoy listening to these while painting.
You made do a few steam purchases.. Not that I have time to play them, but at least my steam library will look cool!

Good stuff as always.
But why can't I use Photoshop for animations?!

Good news Ben!

This is great Ben, Thanks! So many beautiful games I have missed.

Shane, what resolution are you working in? I think you should go really high, as long as there isn't a lot of slowdown there isn't really any downsides working really large. Especially for production when you might want to go back and tweak the image.

Basically, I think I spent about 3, maybe 4 hours on this and wonder if that's too long for something so basic?

Hmm, too long for what? I personally wouldn't focus on the hours, but just try and get a good result. Speed comes later.

1.  Establish a basic sketch (this always takes me the longest).

Yes, spend as much time as possible on the sketch. It is really the base of the painting and you focus on only solving drawing errors.

2.  Fill it in with basic values.  I have the hardest time getting the paint bucket to just fill areas I want without dumping on the whole canvas, so advice on how to make it work more like DPaint/Pro Motion flood fill would be great (or an alternative).

Paint Bucket is fine In my opinions, especially for production art the bucket and selecting tool are time saver creating crisp and clean art. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to make it behave like Dpaint or PM. I use lasso tool to select areas and fill them in under the line drawing. But if you have really clean lines that are closed you can probably experiment around with the settings - make sure you check and check contiguous when you want to fill a closed area.


Something else you could consider is to use a more neutral background color. And maybe not to paint "floating heads", but to connect it to a body/neck.

I haven't finished the game yet, but I can say it's a clever and polished game so far.
Great work, and thanks for sharing the 'making of' videos to the community, it was an interesting watch!

Yes, that fixed it.

I can confirm that it works now, both tinting and using it in D3D.

There seem to be a transparency problem when used for dialogues (a room with a background image). Seems to work fine when used over a GUI though - so I suspect it's the AGS transparency limitation which is causing this?

(Your plugins should get some more love, it does fix some of the AGS limitations, but I suspect it's just a minority of the developers who think it's a problem)

[How to find one:]

I'm probably just echoing what others have said, but here it goes anyway:

How to find one:
I personally would contact and ask an artist whose work I like, know personally or have been recommended.
Otherwise I think you can make a "looking for help" post in any art forum/game development community like tigsource, indegamer, ca.org, gameartisans. Or just look in their portfolio sections and contact artist you like.

How to Pay:
This varies, some will invoice you and some will just ask you to send the money. Paypal and bank transfers are the only two options I have experience with. Some will ask(very few, I'm guessing)  for "hire for work" contract. Some will just discuss over email and make agreements that way.

How often:
This depends on the artist and the project. You will most likely need to ask the artist - I would suggest that you let him/her(I'll just use him for from this point) know what you would prefer and ask if this would be acceptable for him. So it could he hourly, per asset, per mile stone. It can be half money upfront (make sure you trust the artist) and rest on completion. It could be he shows the Final JPG or and send the high res PSD after payment received.
Make sure to ask how he deals with revisions - some might have a set number of revisions before he want to charge more (usually to avoid that the client isn't clear on what he wants or change his mind totally on something that was already agreed and decided in). Some might just use common sense and fix anything you are not happy with as long it's a sane amount of work.
I think VERY few will ask for a fixed weekly or monthly rate. I can't really think of any reason why it would be like this. Another thing would be if you guys agreed that he invoice you every month - but still only for the hours / assets he created.

How much does it cost:
Depends on
1 Time (based on 2 and 3)
2 Skill Level of the artist
3 Complexity
4 Rate (likely based on 2 and 5 )
5 Living/business cost (if doing it professionally)
If you find an hobbyist he are more likely have a lower rate, as he is not depending on his art to survive. Could be a generalization from my part though.
With that said not saying an hobbyist would behave less professional or that his skill level needs to be lower in any way.

Conclusion:
It depends.
I think you can just contact the artist/artists and ask them, they are not expecting that you know how they work.
Most of my client emails contain:
Introduction, project description, interested? available and rate. Some time with a asset list of what needs to be done and ask a time or cost estimation for the work.
Some will ask for a NDA to be signed before revealing detail, sending game design documents and such.

Thanks Joel, that means I didn't have to be the guy.

In other words, I'm also still interesting in this - I didn't want to bother as I assumed you were too busy.

Sounds like you would like to have a new splash screen, but I edited out the version number anyway in case you decide to go with the old one.


A suggestion: Make sure, if you create a new splash screen that you get access to the high resolution PSD file (unless it's pixel art?). It makes things much easier to change in the future.

Congratulations, it's pleasure to help such a ambitious project and a team with so many familiar faces in it!