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Cripes. You put me to shame.  I'm researching suicide in Japan.  It's only 6000 words, but I'm so behind and the deadline is the 16th.

Haha, what level are you writing this dissertation for? For my Ph.D., mine are supposed to be roughly 8,000 word chapters, and I owe seven of those in July with only three done so far (not that it's a contest -- I've had a year and a half already to work on mine!).

EDIT: That 'haha' was meant to imply that I'm not putting anyone to shame, because I'm so far behind, not to laugh at your deadline, or suicide in Japan!

It was great fun. I had a gas, even though I should've been writing my dissertation.

I did chapter corrections, resubmitted and got excellent feedback in return, all during the ceremony.

(What's your field?)

I've been using Scrivener for my design doc and find some of it's functions suited for that purpose. If you've never used it, you might want to poke around with it and see if there are some ideas you might borrow for your app.

Not respiratory arrest, as she's breathing. Not cardiac arrest, as she has a pulse. So I think we can get away without doing CPR, but I will yield to anyone who's a health industry professional. She may be in shock, but the cyanosis of the lips means she needs oxygen. I support giving her our mask before she does go into respiratory arrest.

...I think that floor texture would work if it were homogenized a bit more. Try throwing a layer of flat brown in a 100% Color layer over the floor, and then duplicate that flat brown as a Luminosity layer at about 70% or so.

It'd look like this, but less sloppy:



You might want to punch the color of the rug up a bit while you're at it. Or just choose a better shade of brown for the floor than I did!

I take back all my regrets guys. No matter what happens from here on out, I'm glad we took that morphine.

[have to give the prize to Doc Savage]

I've just realized I hate judging these contests because I hate having to choose one piece over another. But that's the task I set forth for myself when I started this thing, so....

Two fantastic entries again this time.

Le Woltaire - I can hear the bits of Morricone that you're paying homage to here, the mismatched twang of Harmonica's theme, the callback to the alternating notes that open The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, the sort of double homage to Bach's Toccata and Fugue by way of Morricone's ringing organ in "Sixty Seconds to What?" There's some nice dynamicism, and some great moments where melody suddenly appears from a pool of discord.

Doc Savage - Your piece reminded me strongly of later Morricone, especially of his work for Cinema Paradiso, and super especially the beautiful and haunting love theme. The three voices come together to create something wonderfully cinematic, and equally beautiful and haunting. Is this for your MAGS game?

This is a hard decision to make, but I think in the end, I have to give the prize to Doc Savage, just because his piece is a little more tightly composed and polished. Le Woltaire -- you drew on all of the right pieces for me, and I hope you won't mind second place this week!

Here's my entry, if it's not too late!

Harold wrapped her in the thick coils of his arms and held her--the long-desired object of his turgid passion, Janice--against the broad expanse of his chest. Her eyes were green and shimmered, like the dew-covered green grass of early morning spring that proves too thick for the lawnmower blade so that you have to flip the mower and clean out the wet grass with a stick. Her red lips contrasted with her alabaster skin like blood rupturing from a freshly stabbed polar bear. Her cheekbones were high, and she blushed, as though she'd been caught in some illicit act, like pantsing a priest mid-mass.

Harold guided his hand through her auburn hair, his fingers plowing the farrow field of follicles, ignoring the occasional flake from dry scalp and tossing it aside like a stone before the tiller. His lip quivered like a trampoline with stretched springs, and her lips parted with the hot warm expectancy of a bag of freshly popped microwave popcorn slathered with artificial butter. She felt his manliness against her, and he knew that she could feel it, suddenly overcome by pangs of self-consciousness and pulling back, but then realizing that pulling back made him more self-conscious and so pressing forward again, which caused him to be the most self-conscious he possibly could, slowly humping at her like a turbine whose power had been recently disconnected.

He moved his face close to hers and breathed in. She smelled of flowers, generic flowers, like the kind that a florist might install in a bouquet to round out the two or three expensive flowers that you were really paying for, and expected more of, but this will have to do because it's six in the evening on Valentine's Day and this is all they have left. Her warm breath fell against him in waves, with the same undulating power as an obssesive compulsive repeatedly opening an oven to check on a baking cake, not realizing that every time they open the oven, all of that heat is going to get out, and the cake will be ruined anyway. His hands trembled as he held her, like a starving orphan who has been inexplicably dropped off in Buffalo in January, because, seriously, why would you do that. His moist palm found the soft small of her back, the shallow impression like a pit dug for an outdoor swimming pool, but not deeply enough, and the building inspector insists you start over.

He thought back to when he'd first met her, that wonderful day on campus when she came striding across the quad, the sun shining rays down on her like a million spotlights, or maybe just twelve. He'd faltered in speaking to her that day, his words slow to come, and thick in his mouth, sounding as though he were gargling flan instead of speaking English. She'd seen through his nervousness that day, like a two-way mirror. Or is it a one-way mirror? Harold could never remember, but she was definitely the kind of mirror that one person could see through, and the other couldn't. Or was she on one side of the mirror and he on the other? He wondered if the metaphor was failing to work, like Steve, that shitty waiter at Applebee's.

"Janice," he whispered. "Oh Janice, oh Janice." But there was no reply, because sometime between Harold contemplating yardwork and reliving the experience of his earlier meal at Applebee's, Janice had grown tired of waiting for the action to begin, dressed, written Harold a note, left, walked down the block, attempted to purchase a new MetroCard, had her debit card rejected, phoned the bank to find they'd put a security hold on it, remedied the security hold, bought the MetroCard, ridden the subway home, and made a bowl of instant chicken noodle soup, which, though Harold didn't know this, she was then heartily enjoying while watching an unexpected late-night rerun of 'Mama's Family.'

"Drat and bother," muttered Harold, sinking into the rough cotton of too-few thread count sheets. For while Janice had vanished like the existence of powdery white dog shit, his turgid passion remained, like a Christmas present under the tree for a divorced parent whose car will never appear in the driveway.

You're bold to create sprites with such high resolution for your very first project

You've obviously seen the first page of the thread where I tried doing a pixel sprite, and that was an incredibly frustrating process, because it's totally different from the way I'm used to drawing. The process I used to make those above was pretty quick and simple...it literally took a single afternoon to redo everything, and I think I'd be faster at doing a second sprite. My only issue was working out the anatomy of the different angles, and I've done some hand drawings since then that show how much I learned just by going through this process. Also, I'll be using a camera from now on to have better reference for angles, proportions, etc.

* The right walk cycle - I think he's facing the "camera" too much, making it look like a diagonal view. You would probably see his torso more from the side.

Agreed here. I was realizing this when drawing the 3/4's from the front view -- there wasn't a lot of difference in the torsos for those two. The legs, I think, are correct, which may be another one of the reasons that right-walking view bugged everyone.

* The down view is too jumpy - instead of a smooth bobbing motion, he's kind of shaking.

I think part of this is my carelessness in lining up the sprites for the .gif (which would be the same process to make the sprites for the game). I've drawn this character's sprite in a line (not even spaced out for a sprite strip), and then stacked them on top of each other after the fact. It's something I'm going to change for the next sprites I do -- I'm going to stack them from the get-go, and that way I can onion skin easier as well. This first sprite has been a massive learning experience, and I took a lot of wrong steps.

* About the cabin background - this is very obviously a photograph painted over. This is fine, but is it a style you're pursuing? The character is rather cartoony, maybe the backgrounds need a more hand-made, cell-shaded look?

I'm incredibly, incredibly flattered that you think so, but the only photographic element in the picture is a generic wood texture that I used to make the base for the dresser. Everything else references photos (except that sink which is actually based on a pain-in-the-ass dual-fauceted bathroom sink), but nothing actually painted over. There'd be less wrong things about it if I'd painted over...like the stupid looking faucets, or the way my "I can draw these once and copy+paste them" chain links don't line up correctly, or the crookedness of some of the art deco lines on the dresser front, or especially the stripes on the bedspread that I tried to cheat and angle using a polar coordinates filter (these sorts of things are the only things I'm able to see in that image now, so I hate it, and now you probably will too).

But again, you're correct that the character and the room don't match. I think I'm going to hand-draw the backgrounds with harder outlines. This was me trying to follow some of the tutorials here on how to paint backgrounds. Also, this left me with a 49-layer PSD file, which is an incredible pain to deal with, so I don't think I'll be using this method again. I also had a two-perspective grid layer to which I rigidly stuck, and I think I'll allow some more play in that to be cartoony next time. I hate drawing backgrounds when doing comics, and so I'm both lazy and have little talent or experience in that arena, and that has, unfortunately transferred to my game making.

I'm going to try again with a different style for this competition (unfortunately, the best room to do for this would be the ballroom I have planned, but I'm afraid it would skew too much toward the sample pic in the thread's opening post.  ). There is actually a background I've seen recently, a dining room with a fireplace...oh crap. Nevermind. I just went to find it, and it's yours!...anyway, I was going to say that the outlined style that people didn't like there might fit better with my style of art. So maybe I'll hand draw the line art and color / add texture in Photoshop.

What was your process in doing these backgrounds, if you don't mind my asking?

* Also, I'd really really suggest waiting with the diagonal views until later. Not only do they require a ridiculous amount of work, they're also not very necessary except for a stylistic touch. Better proceed with story, coding and backgrounds, to give you a sense of progress.

I believe this player character will be the only one in the game who requires diagonals, so it's not too tough to finish these. Also, I'm working on all of those other things, just not sharing them on the forums! There's a reason there's a long period between posts besides all of my other life obligations. I've been working on a design document. Then I threw the first one out, because it seemed too by-the-book for an adventure game. This will hopefully serve as Chapter Zero for a multimedia, but mostly illustrated prose project I've been working on for awhile, so I know where the character needs to start, and where he needs to end, but not exactly what happens in between.

I also have a practice game set up with a bunch of rooms. No one will ever see it, and the rooms are a mixture of doodles, photographs spliced together with broad layers of color, backgrounds I swiped from this blog for fun, and over-sized vacuums of whiteness to look at walk cycles against. When I get an idea for something and I don't know if it will be codeable, I try things out there, ctrl+x'ing around to wherever I need to go. I'd never share that part of the process with you guys. I've already shared my ugliness in the first post of this thread.

Thanks so much for the time and thought put into your critique, Andail. I've taken your advice to heart and will do my best to act on it accordingly.

Edited to add: Best case, and unlikely scenario, I would love for my backgrounds to look like those overseen by Walt Peregoy in 101 Dalmatians. I think this is line art in a layer over paint.

If Stupot+ ever meets Stupot-, the world as we know it will come to an end.

Star Wars already has an "escape the room" game built in -- "SHUT DOWN ALL THE GARBAGE SMASHERS ON THE DETENTION LEVEL!" would make a good practice game.

Ah! Indeed, I mean the orange guy in the picture below that. I was assigning the captions to the wrong pictures!

After a long, exhausting day at the video game making factory, Arj0n goes home at the end of the day, sinks down into his recliner, pours himself a tall glass of scotch whiskey and says, "Arj0ff."

Thanks for the fantastic entries! I need to take the day off tomorrow, but I'm going to put your tracks on loop while I work, and will return to announce a winner on Saturday!

I'm hoping to get something in, but I have dissertation writing obligations that will keep me up all night tonight. When is the actual deadline again?

I say check in with the mods then, point to the precedent of the previous voice acting competition, and get this thing restarted -- it was your idea, after all!

Whoa! I'll be able to double dip with this one for the game I'm working on. Maybe. If I can figure out how to draw backgrounds in time!

Dibs on a spot!

EDIT: Hey, one question though -- when you say it has to depict the upper-class, do you mean it needs to be an upper-class establishment? Or does it actually have to contain upper class characters?

Those are not cow nostrils. Those are the eyes of a silent anime child wearing a cow-head-shaped cap.

Sorry I killed us, everybody.

This is how I imagine you playing that, Woltaire, on Sartana's deadly pipe organ (though the score for this film was by a Morricone protege, Bruno Nicolai). I'll comment more on this composition after the comp is over!

m0ds -- no problem. I was just worried that my theme had scared everyone away!