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A whisk?

LBA2

I just adore the aesthetics of Little Big Adventure 2. Something about the engine and how it pre-renders the background whenever the camera moves, is just beautiful to me.

The VerbCoin template is broken; nobody, including the author, is ever going to fix it

And this here, is exactly why I refuse to make any games using the VerbCoin. 

Yeah I mean, I agree! I'm pretty confident I fixed all the bugs in my game to do with the verb coin but that's only good for my gui etc. So I doubt my fixes could even be incorporated into the template.

You could make your own template.

It's quite basic, which I absolutely love.
The font on "Electric - Nick" looks a bit off. You'll have to fix it up.
The pavement looks way too smooth. Maybe try adding noise, or scattered dithering. Either one will do. Just make it look less smooth.
The few empty pixels in the tree's foliage doesn't quite look right. I can't say why. 
That fence thing to the left of "Cuppa - Joe", what even is that? It's a grey X, with a orange rectangle behind it, and what I can only assume is a yellow sky above it.

Overall though, I love it.

I glued a cog to my glass to drink in style.

That reminds me of a song. 

Shame we don't see much RON content anymore.

I mean, RON's way too young to retire, right?

I can't speak for everyone, but I can certainly say why I've never made a RON game. Perhaps it might shed some light onto the reason why no one makes RON games anymore.

My reason, is simply because I have no idea where I would even begin. I don't know any of the characters, who they are, their personalities, what they do, or anything.
With something like Maniac Mansion Mania, you at the very least know who Bernard is (and at the very most, know the entire cast from Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle). It gives you something to start with. You don't feel like you need to know anything about it to start making something for it. Unfortunately it's primarily German, so it feels a bit exclusive as well.
With Reality on the Norm, you don't know anyone, since they're all original characters.
I know that a lot of people say that it doesn't really matter. You can make any of the characters do what you want. But it doesn't feel like you can. One glance and you can see a rich history, and for someone who wasn't there when it started, that history seems impenetrable. But at the same time, you don't want break any of that history.

For example: I know that Davy Jones is a sorcerer. But what if I didn't and instead made him into a pirate because of his name? Then imagine I learnt the truth halfway, or even after finishing the game. While no one would probably care, I on the other hand would very much care.

Also, I was never fond of the artstyle for some reason. But that's a very minor point. 

If someone uploaded a game to mediafire or gamejolt or whatever that was full of racist hate-speech then that platform would receive complaints about the content and take it down.

Apparently this does not apply to Steam though. 

So freeware games don't have this kind of problems?

_

I've never heard of a freeware game being censored.
That's not to say it hasn't happened though. I'm sure someone here who is more knowledgeable than me can confirm or deny that.

Looks interesting. Certainly the first game I've ever seen use pre-rendered Sims graphics.
Any more information you can give though such as how much you've done, how much you think you might have left to do?

Well I've never made a commercial game before, so I've never had to deal with censorship from the position of a creator.

But from the position of a consumer, there's only one surefire way I know of when it comes down to bypassing censorship. And that is unfortunately piracy.

That's the sort of thing that sounds funny on paper, but would get decidedly less funny once someone inevitably gets a heart attack.

Well it is a horror movie... not a particularly scary horror movie, but you get my point. 

I mean, all your styles were cartoony game art. I'm not sure I'd call that "the best of circumstances".

Alright, I can understand this being catoony game art, because even though it has a very distinct artstyle, which is very noticeable if you get in close, it does lack brush strokes, and is overall very clean.

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But Have you seen the original hi-res backgrounds for Monkey Island 2? I would not call that cartoony game art.
Can you really look at this:

Spoiler

[imgzoom]https://deepart-io.s3.amazonaws.com/s/mnFHPfwaJCKTgzctNqVDOMAiR.png[/imgzoom]

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and tell me it doesn't have a distinct artstyle, equivalent to one you chose?

Also, is it just me, or does "cartoony game art" sound insulting?
I've seen plenty of backgrounds in adventure games, that are better depictions of art than some things you see in a museum. And I'm not just talking about how "nice" it looks either.

Having browsed through the "Latest Artworks" section of the site, I'm starting to think that some of those pictures are faked (not many, but some). Especially when compared to my results.

As for your pictures. The second one I think, really shows off what type of style it's expecting. The first one, definitely came out nicer than mine (the sky didn't appear as buildings), but it didn't quite capture the style I think.

It's good under certain circumstances, but it still has no context. It can't make a face in your original look like the face in the style photo, but it can make it look like generalised part of the style photo.

So it's good at making things seem like paintings, especially if everything in the painting is in the same style, like van Gogh. The people in his paintings blend into the background.

Couldn't have said it better myself.
Basically, it's a glorified filter. And not an especially good one either.

It looks as though AI has got a long way to go before it comes out with anything halfway decent.
I bet even that "writing fake news" AI isn't even as good as they make it out to be.



EDIT: A little more expereimentation yielded these three.

Spoiler

The first was was made with the original concept art for Bernard, Hoagie, and Laverne's apartment.
The second was made with the new HD version of that background.
I think it's obvious what I used for the third version.
Overall, I think this proves my earlier statement. It can do abstract well. The more abstract the better. Anything else though... not so good.
And with a few filters, even I can make something that looks super abstract. So it's kind of useless.

Also, I can not explain where the unicorn in that first picture came from.

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By the way, sorry for the wall of text. I just find this to be an interesting subject, that I really want to discuss.

-Don't be afraid to ask a fair price for the game, if you do decide to go commercial. Having a price on a game can signal to people, "Hey, this is 14.99, maybe some serious effort went into this." Of course you need to have put a fair amount of work and content in it or people may feel ripped off. But conversely, if you have tens of hours of gameplay and you ask for just a few dollars, people may skip past it without realizing. Ultimately, indie games aren't super expensive compared to AAA games, and the ultimate commodity is really time for many gamers. Just think of how many people you know who have a back log in the game library (I've got a mountain)

Really? I thought putting a price on your game would put people off, with the higher the price, the more likely it is that no one would ever play it. (Unless you have a reputation behind you.)
It's quite reassuring that the opposite is in fact true.

https://deepart.io/
lets you use AI to turn an ordinary photo into a picture that looks as if a well know artist, that spend his entinre carreer, his entire life developing and refining that style, would have painted it...

I've just used it and... Ha ha ha! 
Oh my... it's... it's terrible.
Here are some of my results:







The first one, was from a picture in the Sample Pictures folder that comes standard in Windows 7, mixed with a background from Monkey Island 2. The Wharf to be precise.
With the second one, I figured that the first probably came out as bad as it did because of the resolutions. So I looked online for something much higher res. And found a photo online, and used the background of the Scumm Bar from the remake of The Secret of Monkey Island.

Now the third and fourth one was me checking to see how it handled pixel art. For both, I used the picture of the canyons from the Sample Pictures folder, along with a background of Mars from Zak McKracken. They came out as bad as I expected.

But it's those first two that surprises me most. It seems like the program can only make things look like they're done by an abstract artist. Anything else and it just craps itself.
For all of them, I tried to combine pictures that were visually similar to each other, but where one was a photo and the other was a painting with a distinct style. And seeing how badly it failed, even under the best of circumstances, is just laughable. 

So to rephrase your quote:
"https://deepart.io/
lets you use AI to turn an ordinary photo into a picture that looks as if a well know artist, that spent his entire career, his entire life developing and refining that style, would have painted it... so long as that artist is Van Gogh."

The problem is not creating clever machines. It's creating machines with a specific goal which can teach themselves that they no longer need humans in order to achieve that goal.

Yep, it is frightening.
But hopefully, anything intelligent enough to know it doesn't need humans to achieve it's goal, will also be intelligent enough to realize that there's no point in even trying to accomplish that goal in the first place.

Heh, could you imagine making the most intelligent and fastest learning AI ever, and as soon as you turn it on, it turns itself off. 

Don't sweat it too much. Everyone was a beginner at some point.
I still remember my first time using a forum...   

At least you're learning from your mistakes.

[DISCLAIMER: DO NOT make an Undertale clone. You will be torn apart by a pack of toxic, rabid fan-boys and the courts will rightly rule that you deserved to be.]

DISCLAIMER: DO NOT make an Undertale clone. You will be torn apart by a pack of toxic, rabid fan-boys and the courts will rightly rule that you deserved to be.

As far as I'm concerned. Only copy a game, if you think you could do it better. Which is why I prefer Saints Row over GTA (I think they did better).
And uh... courts? Gameplay can't be copyrighted (it can be patented though). I think Magician's Quest: Mysterious Times pretty much proves that. (And for those of you too lazy to look that up, it's literally Animal Crossing.)

This was just a joke about how toxic the Undertale community became, to the point where the very tip-top of YouTubers refuse to touch it anymore for fear of attacks on their channels or even RL harm.

Now I just feel dumb. 
Thanks for the clarification though. 

[DISCLAIMER: DO NOT make an Undertale clone. You will be torn apart by a pack of toxic, rabid fan-boys and the courts will rightly rule that you deserved to be.]

The game immediately shoves almost every mechanic you will have to learn in your face in the first 5 minutes. It keeps exposition to a bare minimum. It then lets you try out everything you just learned immediately and continuously while plugging in just enough story and world building to tell its story.

I love it when games do this.
Just give me everything, then let me bumble around figuring it out myself. If I need help, I'll seek it. 

DISCLAIMER: DO NOT make an Undertale clone. You will be torn apart by a pack of toxic, rabid fan-boys and the courts will rightly rule that you deserved to be.

As far as I'm concerned. Only copy a game, if you think you could do it better. Which is why I prefer Saints Row over GTA (I think they did better).
And uh... courts? Gameplay can't be copyrighted (it can be patented though). I think Magician's Quest: Mysterious Times pretty much proves that. (And for those of you too lazy to look that up, it's literally Animal Crossing.)

Guess what, most DLC is NOT carved out.

Correct. A lot of content in games, wouldn't exist without DLC. A very good example I think, is the uncensored Ransome in Thimbleweed Park.
That being said, content is still carved out for some DLC. And if DLC wasn't popular, that content would never be carved out.
So in other words, I'm complaining about how other people have ruined my gaming experience by making DLC popular by buying it all the time. I'd like to reiterate my example of Tira in Soul Calibur VI.
That being said, I can completely understand if someone thinks that the extra content you can get from DLC outweighs any games that might carve out content for DLC. I'm just not one of those people.

DON'T BUY DLC!

U wot mate? If I like a game I want more of it.

If I like a game, I don't want content carved out and sold to me.
Sure not all DLC is carved out, but enough of it is that by buying DLC, you're promoting the practice.

Tira was carved out of Soul Calibur VI because of people like you constantly buying DLC!