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(I understand it now, but still don't get why anyone would want to do that. Is there a technical reason for doing things that way?)

As far as I understand it proper 320x200 just ate up too much memory.
And, uh, why would we want to do that? Because... it's... fun?? (I don't know, it's fun for me)

That is super fun to play! You should feel hella proud!

[imgzoom]http://orig13.deviantart.net/aa31/f/2015/344/b/1/sprite_challenge_by_pekj-d9jo3kz.gif[/imgzoom]

Groook, that's so beautiful and you used the three-colours really well but it wasn't made with doublewide pixels.
Shit, I was really worried I hadn't explained that well enough. I've added a little illustration to the first post that might make it clearer but tbh if it's too hard for people to get I'm up for removing that restriction, especially if keeping it means losing the only entrant. How do people feel?

[Rules:]

Your challenge is to create a sprite to the same specs Gary Winick had to work to when creating the very first versions of the Maniac Mansion cast.

Rules:

You must use exactly three colours or less not including the background

As the lovely Syd models for us here; technical limitations mean his hair, shoes and shirt all have to be the same shade of yellow and his skintone has to double up as an outline for his arm.

The colours must be in a similar range to this shitty palette:

I couldn't get a 100% authentic one but AGI's seems similar enough to my untrained eyes at least

The sprites must be usable for a 320x200 game with doubled-up horizontal pixels

Essentially Maniac Mansion is a 160x200 game that's been stretched out across the screen. You need to think of every pixel you put down as a rectangular block. You see how Razer's eyebrows have a subtle one-pixel slope in the version on the left? That effect's not possible on the right version.
EDIT FOR HOPEFULLY LESS GARBAGE EXPLANATION:

The guy on the left was drawn normally, a 1x1 grid of squares that make up an image. The guy on the right was drawn using a grid of 2x1 rectangles. In other words every 'pixel' he's drawn with is actually two pixels of the same colour placed side by side. I hope this makes it clearer what I'm going for?
If you don't get this rule please feel free to ignore it, stand strong with Grok, reclaim this contest for the people and overthrow my tyranny.


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These limitations are a lot of keep in your head at once but a fantastic way of creating art like this is with AGI Studio, if you download that and click the 'new view' button then the colours and doublewide pixels will be set up for you and you can just focus on creating the most appealing sprite you can.
I've used it to make a bunch of goofy gifs and such this year and it's lots of fun. Promise!

Your sprite can be a Mansion Kid, Monster, Totally original character, Character from a different franchise, Inanimate object, ANIMATE(d) object, Whatever you like. No restrictions at all on theme or content. Just so long as you stay within the technical specs.

Winners announced on the 16th. Have fun with it, peeps!

It's too bad more people didn't enter, I'd have loved to see more takes on this!

Guys! I recreated the invisible bird bug! It might involve some frustration while I tear my own confusingly-written code apart but I think I can finally slay this dragon.

Nice one, but the end... when can we expect the sequel?

I am so gratified people finished the game feeling okay despite what a technical mess it was. I'M SO HAPPY PEOPLE FINISHED AT ALL.
Uhh I think I might start working on one around Mmmarch? Maybe? I definitely want to have scrubbed-up versions of the first two out there before then. Aaaaand maybe add voice-acting to 'em. I always wanted these things to have voice-acting. It's probably a roundabout reason why I thought that problematic subtitle-style text was a good idea

Primordia's one of my all time favourites of the genre, can't wait to see more of this!

I've tried!


Kate Catsize! Intended to be in the style of a Spy Fox character.

I'm very terrible at this game but let's just pretend I was enthusiastic to see as much of the cool monster graphic as I could.

Really well made thing! I think if it was rebuilt in something that ran in a browser could be a lil cult hit at spooky sleepovers

Thanks yeah! Maybe if I see it in action I'll have a flash of inspiration about what might have caused it

Thanks man...dle. I'm glad you had a positive experience despite the myriad issues.

So far my vote's swinging to Song Animals but I still have to finish Freak and Dennis.

That really sucks to hear, I'm so sorry

I'm super-stoked to play DOTT on my Vita!
The remastered characters graphics are pretty dang awful but since I've no doubt they can be turned off I ain't mad about it.

I hope you're not not still stuck on this, I'll put up the solutions just in case others fall foul of my rushed, made-up-as-I-went-along puzzle design:

Spoiler

The bird is used to distract the dogs so Scylla can't use them for eating, it always flies away in whatever direction you approach it so the solution is to chase it to either the outdoor room with the pipe or the room adjacent to it and then backtrack to the top level again so you can slide down and make it go the other direction. There's no ingame hint that the dogs will be distracted by the bird which is totally something I should add.

The cabinet can't be used just yet so no worries about that.

Use the chalk again for a rhyme for 'think' because it's pink allegedly. You may think it's more of a purple and I may agree with you. Hey ho, that's another thing I should change.

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Oh my goood! I love the way these pseudo-3D racers look!
I want to select Larry Vales as my racer!!

[plus]

Been working on addressing some of the big issues that have come up this evening.


New look for the inventory plus a feature I've wanted since the first game but kept having to prioritise other stuff over: highighting inventory cursors. I'm hoping this makes it a bit more intuative.


Somewhat ugly looking new GUI for when you ESC out of the game which should help with the ambiguity about this game autosaving


New optional way of displaying speech


New settings menu for enabling said option now with added pipe-dream voice acting options just in case

What do you guys think? Once the voting period's over I'll upload whatever changes get figured out and Future Generations Will Not Suffer As You Fine People Have

That was totally inspired! I loved it!

Spoiler

And I can't believe how musically illiterate I am that the last sequence had me stumped for so long

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@Creamy :
Uhhhhh, cos it's rad

Thanks for all the input guuuys!

Thanks so much for the kind words guys.
I  am so sorry about that inventory, it seemed like such a smart idea at the time but it obviously needs a shit-tonne more clarity. Also the game needs a readme at least, I'd say about 50% of people who play this end up coming to me saying they can't figure out how items work D:

That criticism about the subtitle-style speech text is interesting. That's something I really wanted in the first game because my weird sprite dimensions were making the text appear all over the place. I guess it wouldn't be too hard to put the Gui with the text back over characters heads I'd be able have control over how far above them it appeared which was my main problem in game 1.

I'm totally hitting you up for personal message secret animation talks.

Y'know it diiiid occur to me as I was playing yours that we might have a certain compatibility there! We should swapped notes about motion-tweened monster limb articulation!

Aaa I was aware of this. There was a day or so where the game was refusing to run and disabling sprite compression was one of the things I did that seemed to make it work again :/ I didn't want to mess with stuff again after that.
I will build a sprite compressed version right now for you, though. I'm sure I was just being superstitious.

Here you go. It looks like the issue I was having was with my virus scanner, I had to disable it for this version to run so if you're using Avast you might have to do the same