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I expect you'll get some backlash from pixel-lovers, but in my opinion, the animation and the environment are positively lovely. My 2.5 year old was totally sold on the game as well. My only suggestion is that some of the brushstrokes in the background are large and, while giving a whimsical feel, kill some of the effect of the field of depth, i.e. it looks more like a stage backdrop as a result.

But seriously, that's a minor suggestion, compared to the beauty of the rest of the work. I need to learn how to use AnimeStudio. I love the new MangaStudio for illustration.

Even if the rest totally fall flat, Act I was one of the most sublime experiences I've ever had playing a video game. I'm only halfway through Act II. Looking forward to the arrival of summer so I can catch up.

I'll share this brief (and slightly discordant) intro to a fake radio show out of competition, and look forward to the new topic!

That works brilliantly, Gurok! Thank you!

found it visually confusing in the end. It's odd, but when both the portrait and the regular view are animated at once, your eye is drawn to two places, one of them not where the text is.

I suppose I'll find this out in letting others test, eventually, but one of my motivations is that my sprites are hi-res and generally pretty big on the screen, so it doesn't look right to me for the character to sit idle. But this is a good thing to keep in mind. Thank you!

[Question 1:]

...So I've finally gotten together enough art assets that I'm forcing myself to start programming a game. I've got two questions, probably the first of many to come, with apologies if these are obviously simple, and with appreciation for your time and guidance.

Question 1:
I'm trying to move a Sierra-style portrait system to the bottom of the screen, as I've created backgrounds with a lot of foot room, and not as much head room (so heads of characters were constantly blocked by the dialog box). I've successfully done so, using Crimson Wizard's recent addition to 3.3.0, Speech.CustomPortraitPlacement (thank you, CW!).

The portrait's now in the right place, but the accompanying dialog box still aligns to the top of the portrait. Since it's at the bottom of the screen, I'd like the text box to align with the baseline of the portrait (which I've set to be 15 pixels from the bottom of the screen).

Is that possible?

Question 2:
Now that the heads are visible, I am curious as to whether it would be possible for there to be an additional talking animation to be played for the character's non-portrait, walking-around sprite. I'll be lip-syncing the portrait (hopefully with voice tracks), but the sprite can just have a simple loop of three mouth movement frames.

Is that possible?

Thanks again!

What's more impressive to me than the final product is your process gif. Thanks for sharing that. I've still never figured out how to go about the last stage of rendering where everything comes together.

Also, this thread is amazing in general. Cheers to all.

I recommend Andrew Loomis' Fun With a Pencil, which is available as a PDF (but is now BACK in print!). Following that, the other Loomis books are great too.

Glad to know that the presence of

Spoiler

goats

[close]

is still equivalent to annoying puzzle creation in the Broken Sword series.

If I paid full price at a movie theater for an hour long movie, for a song that was one minute long, for a book that was fifty pages, for meal that was two bites, etc...I would make a criticism that I did not feel I got the value out of those purchases.

To play devil's advocate, I would gladly pay full price for Resnais' Night and Fog, The Descendents' "I Like Food," Fitzgerald's A Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and any number of high-quality amuse-bouches because they're worth it. I've never personally had a narrative experience where I thought, "This has not sufficiently passed enough of my time" on a quantitative scale. I've thought that some efforts could have spent some more time developing characters, or, more often, taken less time to get to the point. But those are questions of how time suits the story at hand, and not some external sense of how many minutes I expect it to take up.

Congratulations! I anticipate much deserved celebration and fanfare as folks get their hands on this one. I'm looking forward to seeing how it's changed since the beta.

It's because she needs a bit more hip before her legs start. Note in my draw-over how far down I moved her butt in relation to her torso.   

That assumption is not valid because the cars and buses derive from human creation, naming and definitions (although definitions may be impled rather than express). They are what they are because we have created and defined them through social convention.

Symbolic Interactionism. Didn't expect to see that one pop up here.

RPS on Moebius:

One puzzle requires you to bribe an explicitly teenage girl to bend over such that her arse will distract an adult man while you steal from him. Another requires you to bestow a woman with empty gestures and gifts until she's interested in sleeping with you, whereupon the only correct solution to the following sequence is to horrifically threaten to murder her with a knife, in possibly the most ill-advised scene I've seen in a long time.

RPS on Goodbye Deponia:

I want to assume that this isn't a directly and deliberately racist statement, but rather the result of abject stupidity. But it remains what it is, and what it is, is plain grotesque. Meanwhile, there's no mistaking the deliberate choice to offer a pathetic portrayal of a Chinese stereotype, complete with Ls swapped with Rs....This is mostly a bland, overlong, and unamusing game. But that god-damned monkey scene, and the thick seam of misogyny that runs throughout, renders it an ugly, foul experience.

It strikes me that the main issues they're raising against these games aren't issues of the genre, as these things have little to do with point-and-click, but issues of prejudice wrapped up in poor storytelling (which, unfortunately, spans all genres).

I don't find his pose very natural, at least not if he's supposed to be resting. See if you can find some better balance here.

I think Andail's note is most apt. The issue I see here is that the characters aren't balanced. If they were real, they'd be struggling to hold their balance in the positions you have them in. Think about where the weight is being placed for your two foreground characters: for the sword guy, it's all on that front foot. On the book lady, it's on her extended back hand.

I did this quick draw-over (with a mouse, unfortunately, as my tablet is at work) to show what I mean. I took him off his tip toe, and slid the foot back to put more weight on it (I think I've turned his ankle a little too much, though). I angled the arm so that his forearm is bracing the weight of his torso. I pushed her hips forward, and rotated her back arm so that the hand is facing backward. I lengthened her legs, and moved her other arm out away from her body.

I am also not the world's greatest artist, nor anatomist, so others should feel free to correct me! Your rendering is good, once you get these quirks of anatomy down. The guy in the back, as noted by others, is great. I like seeing a version of him in a different style than I'm used to seeing him in!



(EDITED: To fix a couple of things.)

I haven't seen any links to this, and think some here will be interested in the technique: HD Index Painting in Photoshop.

EDIT: Well damn, I missed Trapezoid's post. Thanks for merging, Snarky!

Is that "cool" asked in the McLuhanian definition of the term?

Happy to have backed this. The art is fantastic.   

Yay! Jesper Juul, Salen & Zimmerman, and Johan Huizenga cited on an adventure game forum! Magic Circle ftw!   

What's your academic background, Janos? I've heard Juul's latest is great.

Miguel -- you're hitting on a still-ongoing debate in games studies: do video games belong to ludological or narratological studies? Here's a piece by Juul on the matter.

I may request an extension as well. I never get these things done on time.

I think you have a poltergeist!