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I finally got around to playing this today, and found it to be good fun. I didn't encounter any of the issues folks did above, so I guess I got the updated version. Also, I noticed the

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so had no trouble there either! This was a nice first game!

This movie featured a variety of beloved television stars, but none of them are Don Knotts or Andy Griffith, nor indeed Howard "Floyd the Barber" McNear.

I just went through a samurai/chanbara movie phase, but instead of revisiting the Kurosawas, I tried to watch the films by other directors I hadn't seen. The original 13 Assassins and The Great Duel, Sword of Doom, Samurai Rebellion, Ballad of the Paper Balloons, etc.

Here's a new one:

I am following the advice from King Lear's fool

I'm guessing it's Ran? Been awhile since I've seen that one.

> take off hat and put it into backpack

I'm going to -1 this one, if that's possible, because of #1 on this list. Remember that WHAM has no qualms about us killing ourselves off.

I've got a...jeeze, almost a 14-month old (time flies). Fatherhood's the best thing that's ever happened to me. Best of luck and be extra kind to your wife during the next year and a half (pregnancy + recovery).

Needed something to use to give a five-minute lesson in making paths and bezier curves in Illustrator. Feel free to use or to reject. I can also send an .ai or .eps file:

I only recently upgraded the video driver in my notebook, and in between the last update and this one, they fixed whatever was causing the image of most AGS games to stretch on my widescreen monitor (they were all accepted resolutions, but didn't display with sidebars). So if you do get one and it stretches, try updating those.

That is not a lens blur, its a motion blur.

In which case, I find it's beneficial to prop an elbow on something while taking the picture. Cheap monopod.

I'm just going to drop this useful link in here for any future visitors to this thread.

If you make a Slender Man game, I will write about you in my dissertation. If that's incentive one way or the other.

Having said that, I'd say that finally getting to Wiley's castle in Mega Man 2, with no cheat codes, was probably the closest I came to beating a Mega Man game, and that made me proud.

I didn't beat Mega Man 2 until I was an adult with an emulator that could save states. That damned dragon always got me. Love that game though.

>Examine me

Thanks, you helpful mouse! (And thanks again, Shane, by proxy!)

* The upper arms seem to be a bit too short (but this might only look this was because of the shirt sleeves)
* The general movement is smooth, but the bouncing is hard and abrupt (not sure how to say that)

Edit: I love the boots!

Just the bouncing is very abruptly and the shoulders are completely stiff - I would like to see some movement at that part.

Thanks guys for your respective critiques!

It is partially because of the rolled up sleeves that the upper arms seem short. And it's also partially because I was tricked by the rolled up sleeves into making his upper arms too short. Good eye, cat! Elbows should be much lower.

I'll try and smoothen the bounce. Maybe reduce the pixels traveled by the torso and head. Do you think the shoulder movement should be where the sleeve starts, Tabata, or along the curve of his back? I'll make my wife walk around for me and try to see.

Best thing about the cowboy boots -- they curl up on the end, and so when the foot goes back and rolls off the floor, they're already the right shape, and you don't have to animate a joint in the foot! I'm trying to figure out whether I can animate a seam in his jeans without it being jerky. I was also thinking of how to do forearm tattoos, and, with the arms needing to be redone anyway, I think I've figured out the best way to do it.

This fellow will also eventually be the third detective/the receptionist in a detective agency for the longer game I'm working on (and for which the front door of the detective agency can be seen above), but I think his sprite will mostly sit behind a desk in that one. This shorter game will be about one of his toughest cases yet -- as a babysitter.

I tried a trial version of Anime Studio to try to do this, but I'm afraid I didn't quite get it to work. But I did figure out how to set a rotate point in Illustrator, which resulted in the animation being much, much smoother (and quicker!). Start-to-finish, this version took about two hours, which included 3D modeling the face so I can do the other perspectives. If anyone else does vector animation in Illustrator,  alt-click while using the rotate tool does the job. I set up pink points on the places where the joint should be rotated so I can do it precisely, and then just deleted them later. I grouped my limbs in degrees, rotating, for instance, the whole leg first, and then the calf second.

A man who spent most of his life wearing a drab grey suit and working in a fluorescent-lit office retired and dipped into his savings to take a trip to Europe. While there, he promised himself he would be adventurous, try anything that came across his path, and basically live life for the first time after years of having slaved away for the company.

It was in a restaurant in Spain when he saw a man eating a plate of two fried, thick hunks of meat. He called the waiter over.

"What's that man having?" he asked.

"Ahhhh yes," said the waiter. "Señor has excellent taste. Those are the testicles of the bull, the loser in today's bullfight."

The man took a deep breath, thought of his promise to himself to try everything, and said, "I'll have what he's having."

The waiter's countenance fell a bit as he said, "I apologize, señor. We have only one bullfight per day, and so only one plate per day of this particular item. If you would like to come back tomorrow, I will reserve this delicacy for you."

The man agreed, and went to his hotel thinking of how privileged he was to get this opportunity. The next day, he returned, and the waiter put a plate in front of him. The two chunks were tiny, less meaty, and looked nothing like what he'd seen the day before. The man felt as though he'd been gypped, and said so.

The waiter's countenance fell again as he explained, "You must understand señor...the bull is not always the loser."

Still working on that background and some others. Taking lots of photographs as the seasons change here. Going to the city for New York Comic Con next weekend, and the weekend after, we're going on a drive through Vermont with some art gear in tow, so will hopefully get some better experience working with autumn colors.

Otherwise, I'm going to take a break to try to enter the MAGS competition for October. This will be my first MAGS entry, and, should I pull it off, my first completed game in AGS. It's only going to be a few rooms and two characters, so I have high hopes.

Here's a WIP of one of the characters I spent a few hours on tonight:



Things I see wrong:

* Arms swing too much.
* Forearm needs to have movement -- too stiff now, and makes him look like a robot.
* Need to give the hair some bounce.
* I think he might pick up his foot a little too far when it's in back, or maybe it's not high enough on the frame after?
* Head bounce a little too much on the downstep?
* Hands look like panther paws because I'm horrible at drawing hands and probably always will be.
* Need to outline the boots so they'll stand out better.

Now what do you see?

Thanks all for your continued assistance. Every new thing I do, I feel like I'm improving, and a major portion of that is your collective fault.

Since many of my friends have children now, there's fewer occasions for us to get together and play any kind of serious pen & paper game like Call of Cthulhu

I've never played a pen & paper RPG to completion. I've sat in for part of a D&D game, and got pretty bored, and for part of a Star Wars RPG (bored again). I think I need to play with people who are better at storytelling and less excited about math.

The best experience I've had with this type of RPG was a Call of Cthulu game played via Google Wave with my brother-in-law and a friend of his. He encouraged us to take time with the characters, and we never actually got to fully investigating the haunted house fully (before Wave was shut down) because we were spending a lot of time setting scenes, creating dialogues together, etc. That was a lot of fun, though I think I would've been disappointed if my little guy had died/been driven mad right away.

I never actually beat the game, but the first and only time I finished this level in TMNT for NES:

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