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Its a little plain.

Yeah, I agree. There's nothing to indicate what kind of space this is supposed to be. There need to be some more details to establish the scene (dust, empty crates, etc). It's also a bit cramped - there's not much floor space to move around in. If you were going to stage a crime scene investigation in this room, you'd be hard pressed to fit everyone into the picture.

Also, I'm not sure that sign is "realistic." First, it's kind of useless, because if someone's reading it, they're already in the restricted area. Second, hanging it on the wall would disturb the crime scene itself. As Rap4Life42o mentioned, there should be yellow police tape - but that would block entry into the room, so you probably wouldn't see anything inside the room itself.

Finally, it seems a little "clean" for a crime scene (not to mention an abandoned warehouse). The pool of blood doesn't really look liquidy - just kind of like a red spot on the floor. Maybe some more gore, or splatter, or environmental damage (as Rap4Life42o also mentioned).

But I don't mean to sound too harsh. I think it's actually a really good start. Definitely good practice!

Hmmm. Interesting premise. Kind of evokes something along the lines of Being John Malkovich, in that an off-the-wall situation is handled rather matter-of-factly.

I'm curious to see how your parser will turn out. One of my issues with text parsers in graphic adventure games has always been that they never seem to "go all the way" - at some point you're using arrow keys to move around or pressing special keys to bring up menus. It moves the hands away from the typing position and, as a result, typically ends up feeling like kind of a forced experience to me.

Anyway, good luck with getting this one finished!

Well, with the help of lots of Kill Bill music, I finally got a walk cycle done.

I suppose I should mention that I'm planning on using this gal in a fight game - think Double Dragon with schoolgirls and yakuza. I've included a sprite from the original Double Dragon game so you can get a feel for what I'm going for.

(x1) (x3)  double dragon sprite: (x1) (x3)

(x3)

I think for the most part I succeeded, but she seems a little stiff to me. In particular, there's not much movement in her upper body. Any suggestions for making her look a little more natural?

Of course, if there's anything else that people would like to comment on, let it out! Thanks!

LA hasn't shut down a fan-game since FOMI (Fate Of Monkey Island for all you infidels) part...5 I think. And that's been years now.

What about Lucasfan and his Maniac Mansion remake and Zak McKracken sequel? He was shut down less than a year ago.

You won't get in trouble (at least not at first), you'll just get a letter from a lawyer telling you to stop production. What are the chances of that? Roll the dice ....

Change is bad.

Here, here! After all, look what change just did to our solar system!

Anyway, shifting into serious mode, ... I do think using the new sprite is the way to go. As ProgZmax pointed out, people are already using the default. People are going to use it no matter what, so might as well provide something nice. At least that will give people playing the games something nicer to look at. 

But more importantly, if the demo is supposed to be a useful resource for people who are serious about learning how to design a game, I think it's in everyone's best interest to have as professional a demo as possible. I myself am currently trying to improve my sprite skills, and I can learn a lot more by studying ProgZmax's new sprite than the current one.

Stupid scientists. What do they know, really? Somebody should hit them all with a ball peen hammer.

Pluto is dead. Long live Pluto!

I think the third effort is an improvement. Without a picture of the actual girl, it's hard to tell how close you are to the model, but I think it looks good. It looks like she lost a little bit of her smile from the original. Not really a criticism, but I guess I'd just prefer the bigger smile.   

Oh, and she's wearing a blue jewel thing in the belly button.

My comment on her belly button was referring to the left/right position of it. The line marking the center of the shirt should also be the centerline of her torso, so the belly button should pretty much line up underneath the center of the shirt. Right now it looks right-of-center.

can't seem to get the index finger look right

Try making the fingers a little longer. For the left hand (her right), I think the fingers need extend farther forward. Same, I think, with right hand (her left): try extending them a little bit farther forward and lower down.

No demo? I saw the subject line and was eager to try it out. Oh well ....  :'(

The screenshots look good so far. Seems like there's a lot going on in this game ... Nazi's, Daleks, multiple planets ... I hope you can pull it all together! Anyway, it looks interesting. Take your time, have fun with it.

Well, I realize I'm new here, but here's a vote for ProgZmax's version of the sprite. The only potential downside I see is that maybe everyone will start using the default! 

But I do agree about the cup - no touch! I've got a big black cup (close enough, I suppose) sitting by my side even as I type.

Yeah, I think the original edit is actually pretty close. I don't think the ears really need to be changed - it just looks to me like they're covered by hair. But the face in the original is a lot better than the edit. I think the one thing that could be fixed is the pupils of her eyes. She's looking a little cross-eyed. The edit actually improved it.

I also can't quite come to grips with her skirts/pants/shorts/whatever it's supposed to be. It needs to be clarified a little, or maybe just changed completely.

Oh, and I just noticed, her belly-button looks a bit off center.

This is a great start! For the most part I agree with monkey and Evil.

What strikes me most is the differences between the dark and the bright leaves. I think it's a little too much. The couple of bright leaves in the front really distracts me from the rest of the piece.

The trunk of the big tree doesn't look quite right. The texture and coloring looks more like stone than wood. And it needs some shading to make it look round. The smaller  trees in the background look great!

I think the real problem with the beach chair is that the top and bottom parts are inconsistent. The top, where you lean back against, looks cushiony like monkey said. But the bottom, where the feet would dangle off, just kind of ends. If it's meant to be cushiony, the bottom end needs some thickness. If it's supposed to be flat, you need to remove the thickness from the sides.

Until monkey mentioned it, I also didn't realize the back of the beach wasn't the waterline. It needs something - maybe shading, or more of a sense of sloping down to the water - to make it clear that there's more beach that's out of view. If you removed the other umbrellas you wouldn't be able to tell at all that there's supposed to be more beach.

These look really good. The edits make him look a little less frantic, but I think you may have done a little too much.

Down: I like the change to the arms - it doesn't look like their flailing about quite as much - but something looks wrong with the legs. If you compare it to your original, now it doesn't look like the foot that's on the ground is moving back as he steps forward with the other one. It looks more like he's tap-dancing in place or something.

Up: It looks like he's marching or goose-stepping to me. I think his foot goes to far forward or up when he steps forward. Also, his arms kind of swing out to the sides; I think you need to make it more front-to-back like when he's walking down.

Side: There's something slightly off, but I'm not sure what. It looks like he's about to fall forward or something. I think maybe make his legs and arms need to swing forward a little bit more. I guess it looks like he's catching his step a little bit. But I'm not sure.

Don't get me wrong, these are really close. You just need to tweak it in so it looks natural. Along the lines of ProgZmax's suggestion, you may want to walk around your house and pay attention to what you do. It also helps if you can walk in front of a full-length mirror.

EDIT: Oops. I just realized the new edits were by ProgZmax, not Fulcrum. That's what I get for posting in the middle of the night. My comments probably don't mean much anymore. But I agree with Mad-Hatter says, it'd be nice to see your edits too.

when I say "blob", I mean a more solid jelly-like creature, so their shape is generally retained.

What if you gave them more of a candy-corn or gumdrop shape? Or maybe some more "compression" in the bottom and/or middle part of their body, so they bulged out a bit instead of being so narrow and cylindrical? I'm just trying to think what a tube of jello would look like if it was just sitting there, not in any sort of container or anything. Or maybe try making the hair color different from the rest of their body.

I don't know, just some ideas if you're looking for something a little different. I guess I can see what other people are talking about, but I think you'd be ok if you decided to stick with the original designs.

I go through completely random burts of creativity with my game. I go weeks without working on it and then i'll simply work on it solid for days and days. Does anyone know how i be in the second mindset more often.

Well, this might not really be a creative suggestion, but you may want to pick up a book on the creative processs. "Becoming a Writer" by Dorothea Brande is a classic that I know of. Although it deals specifically with writing, it goes into developing the creative process and eliminating "writer's block." I'm sure there are others out there.

Although, personally, I'm not sure there's much "creativity" involved in game-making once you get past the design phase. At that point, I think it's more about discipline/motivation: figuring out how to program/script it, designing the graphics, etc.

Why do it in Game Maker when he could have someone do it in C?

Using Game Maker (or AGS) handles all the dirty work for you, allowing you to focus on creating the game itself.

Think about it. If you were doing this from scratch, you'd have to write code to:
- directly read input from the keyboard/mouse/joystick
- display graphics on the screen, probably with different subroutines to support different graphics card
- play audio on the speakers, again with different subroutines to support different audio cards
- handle differents processor speeds so the game runs the same on all computers
- since you're using C or C++, you'll have to handle memory allocation
- etc., etc., etc.

That's a lot of work going on "under the hood," even if you only use the built-in scripting languages for Game Maker/AGS. You can basically say "draw this sprite" or "check if the up arrow is being pushed," and it does it for you. If you were working from scratch, you'd have to write the code to do these things. Even professional companies license other companies' game engines to make their own games (especially for FPS).

There's still a lot of work to be done even if you use one of these programs. For example, 2ma2 will still have to script out his entire fighting engine, and what happens when (for example) you get punched, or fall into a pit, or get hit with a knife ....

Is it ethical, moral, or even descent to remake games or to import ideeas from those games?

I think if depends on your intent. I don't see anything wrong with "fan" games, stories, art, etc. Now if you're ripping off someone to try and make money, that's a different story. Unfortunately, "the law is blind," as they say. If you're copying something, it doesn't matter what your intent is, it's "illegal." Of course, it's up to individual companies how much energy they put into pursuing copyright violations. Some companies support and embrace their fan communities, others are fairly strict about what people can and can't do with their material.

Look unless your game is a really big deal, and not all games in AGS are that big, there is no chance that any piblisher will waste even a second in his life to find you and e-mail you, espeacially if there are no money involved.

I wouldn't be so sure about this either. Look at Lucasfan ("Maniac Mansion" remake, "Futher Adventures of Zak McKracken"), who was shutdown, as well as a rather harmless AGS fan game using Garfield. I believe one of the KQ remakes was also shutdown (although I think they then went and got permission from the copyright holder). It's unlikely that you'd get shutdown, but definitely not impossible.

While it's true that nobody can blame you for using an idea (fighting in hell, pirates, a wizard school, whatever), it is a violation of copyright if you follow another's plot or setting too closely.

This is important! Copyright doesn't just apply to names, but also to "intellectual property." What does this mean? Take Dune for instance. I'm no lawyer, but effectively it means that the whole "world" (characters, places, settings) is copyrighted. Even if you made completely new characters and a completely new plot, you could be violating copyright if you set it on the same planet (um ... Barsoom? I've never actually read the books). How much do you need to change to prevent violating the copyright? Well, this is where the lawyers come in. There's a lot of subtleties to copyright law which are beyond all of us (unless there's a lawyer in the forums!)

Personally, I'd play it safe. I wouldn't want to put a lot of time and effort into a project just to have some overpaid lawyer tell me I had to get rid of it. I'd recommend either contacting the owner of the copyright or just stay away from using someone else's setting. I don't think contacting the copyright owner would actually be that difficult - just get their address and mail them a letter. If you explain what you're trying to do, I think most times they'd be OK with it (just hang on to their response letter!).

Or, take your story and try to distill it down to the bare concept. Hitchcock once talked about the "MacGuffin" in his stories - that "thing" which motivates the characters. Although it seems really important, it's not. The story is really about the characters, and how they react to events and change over the course of the story. Once you've decided on what's going to happen to them, it doesn't really matter what the "cause" is. Again, take Dune. What's your story? "Desert people on the planet Blah must destroy the giant sandworms or face extinction." Okay, what's the core concept here? "Desert survival (a bad situation) with something attacking them (even worse)." So, what should that "something" be? Other people? Ghosts? Aliens? Notice, you don't even have to set this on a foreign planet! Yet, your idea was "inspired" by Dune, and you're not violating copyright in any way!

Well, I guess I started to ramble. Maybe my example wasn't so great, but hopefully you get my point ....

Is it your intention to create this game completely from scratch? If not, I'd suggest taking a look at Game Maker, which seems to be a pretty good program for making action games (kind of the "AGS of platformers," in my opinion). Although you're encouraged to register it (20 USD or 15 Euros), you can make complete games with the free version.

Babar's post reminds me of this article, which I'm sure most people here have already seen. And I have to say I agree. I remember playing a game (Scary Mutant Space Aliens from Mars, in fact) where, in order to get a spaceship to work, you had to put a piece of cheese in a garbage can. And this was pretty much the first puzzle in the game. Think that was a frustrating experience?

In this context, I agree with Babar. What's the point? This isn't fun, it's totally absurd! There's been lots of discussions on these boards about puzzle design, and I think there's a general consensus is that the story should come first, and the puzzles should develop naturally from the story. I would suggest that, depending on the story, this might mean that a game may have no puzzles at all! The Interactive Fiction (IF) community certainly has plenty of examples of puzzle-less, pure story-driven games. I don't see why there can't be adventure games that are the same. But I don't think such games will ever be mainstream.

For games with puzzles, I think the main concern should be, again, does this puzzle fit within the context of the story? And does it make sense? If I actually found myself in this situation, how would I try to solve this? I think if a puzzle meets these requirements, you shouldn't worry too much about how easy or hard it is. You can't really control whether people will look up the solution. But, if people do have to look up the solution, I'd prefer the reaction to be "Oh yeah, that makes sense. Why didn't I figure that out?" instead of "WTF? What were they thinking?" The first reaction will probably keep people involved with the game, maybe evening learning something to help with other puzzles. The second reaction will probably be followed by "This is stupid, I'm not wasting my time with this." It makes all the difference.

The other thing that I think has "killed" adventure games is their failure to evolve with the times. I think I would have to disagree with Nostradamus that graphics killed the genre. Rather, it was (is) the genre's failure to embrace new technologies. In fact, to me, it seems like somewhat of a waste that all these super-realistic 3D engines are only use in 1st-person shooters. Take the Half Life 2 engine for instance. Think of the adventure game you can make with that!

Just consider an average bedroom with a desk. In a traditional adventure game, you'll have some hotspots that you can interact with (the bed, the desk, a drawer in the desk, etc.), maybe a couple items you can grab, and if there's some puzzle involved in the room, some pre-determined way to solve it. Now consider if this game was implemented with one of those 3D engines. The entire room would be interactive! You open the desk drawer and see a bunch of pens, pencils, paperclips, a scissors, etc, etc. that can all be grabbed and used. You can push the bed around, maybe even toss it through the window, send the desk right behind it, throw the scissors into the wall, and then use the chair to smash the door down. You've just totally redefined the experience!

I think if adventure games moved in this direction, you'd see a lot of issues with puzzle design disappear. No longer would you have puzzles like "put cheese in garbage can to power the spaceship." Or if you did, then that means you've just redefined the physics of cheese. So now, maybe you could also use that cheese to power a car, or shoot it with a bullet and blow a hole in a wall, etc. In fact, I think you'd see a shift away from creating specific puzzles and more towards creating specific experiences, and as a result a lot more emphasis on story. Would this be considered an "adventure game?" I suppose it depends on your definition, but I certainly think it would be something someone would want to play.

Finally, I'd have to agree with Radiant: I think it's debatable whether adventure games are actually "dead." Look at the success of Longest Journey and Dreamfall. Head over to the http://www.adventuregamers.com or http://www.gameboomers.com/, and it seems like there are a good number of commercial adventure games in production.

Anyway, that's just my 2 cents.

What a great looking game! I enjoyed Cedric and this one looks just a good. Your backgrounds look excellent - a really nice use of color.

Good luck with finishing this up. But do make sure you get out and enjoy the summer - although it doesn't sound like that's a problem for you! 

Birds are screeching. Cars are being driven etc.

The edit was nice, but I'm not so sure about the "screeching birds" in either version. I think I'd go more for capturing the car horns - maybe use some instrument (not sure what Turkish instruments are out there) to simulate those whiny, European-style car horns. "An American in Istanbul" maybe?