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I really dig the style, though the second background is definitely the stronger of the two with its rough lines and almost print-like use of contrast (reminds me of two Danish language games called "Giften" and "Englen", I found a few screenshots at http://www.afsnitp.dk/aktuelt/0/englen.html). So instead I'll focus my criticism on the street scene:

The far background looks pretty good, but the closer buildings are much too neat with straight lines and way too much detail in the brickwork. First of all - please get rid of the gradient on the hotel. I know that it's problematic due to the curve of the facade, but it really clashes with the sharp black-and-white style you're using. Also, the line running under the upper windows of the hotel confuses the shape of the corner. Even taking perspective into consideration I see no way that it could bend UPWARDS at the curve.

I like the idea of having the signs (I assume they mark exits?) in color, but it also makes them stand out - which means that any problem is more likely to be noticed. I think you should try to draw the text by hand instead of using the type tool. As it is now, the subway sign looks a bit too neat, and the hotel sign, again, shows off the difficulties with the shape of that corner.

All that said, this is very promising. I look forward to seeing that character animated.

Edit: Another thing I just noticed, shouldn't the wall to the far right be in shadow? Unless it's lit by another source than the moon of course.

True (though for fading in, you could put the code in the on_event call for eEventEnterRoomBeforeFadein). I actually find it makes for smoother transition if you actually fade as the player walks off-screen, not after he's left. So you could trigger the code on a region near the exit and move the character off-screen with a blocking walk command while the screen fades.

Edit: I had actually forgotten about the FadeIn/Out commands as they are blocking and you would have to wait for the fade to finish before the character enters the screen. In general, fading is way overused in adventure games, even though it has become genre standard. Try cutting straight between scenes - I personally find it keeps up the pace of the game, especially if you don't have the player walk all the way onto/off-screen every time. In movies fading is generally used to indicate passage of time or travel between distant locations, so for those instances it does have a purpose.

I don't think it's possible to adjust the transition speed. However, if you just want fade to/from black, the easiest workaround would be to create a full-screen black GUI and fade in/out by adjusting its transparency in repeatedly_execute_always.

In general Flash should be avoided unless it's absolutely necessary for the functionality of the website. Although Jacob Nielsen's article on the usability nightmare of Flash is a few years old, most of his points are still valid.

Also, you don't actually need to compile the game to test it.

If you're using 2.72 or earlier versions, instead of using the "Test" function (which compiles the game first) to run your game, copy acwin.exe to your game folder (not the "compiled" folder) and run it to launch your game in it's most recently saved state.

If you're using 3.0 it's even easier, since the "Run" function (F5) in the engine will do the very same thing.

I'm sorry if this has been reported before, but I didn't feel like going through all 37 pages of the thread to check, and it's not mentioned in the "outstanding issues" bit. I haven't had much time to play around with the 3.0 editor yet, but one thing which annoys me somewhat is the way you open  the branches of the project tree:

The most direct way is to click the "+" icon next to the part you want to open. This works perfectly, but let's face it, hitting the icon is a bit too much of a pixel hunt to be worth the bother. So instead I doubleclick the text, which does the same thing - almost. If I doubleclick "Rooms" or "Scripts", the room or script which is under the cursor after the list opens, will automatically open up too, meaning that I'll have to close that random tab every time.

Maybe this is typical .NET 2.0 behavior, but it does cause a bit of confusion and a few seconds of lost time whenever I open one of those branches.

Ditto on the James Randi crush. I'd definitely play a debunking game, and I'd be even more interested if the player character had to pull off a couple of tricks of his own. What about a game with Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle as the two player characters exposing fraudulent psychics and investigating fairy photography?

The spoonbending thing reminded me of this old Fry & Laurie sketch.

Finally, it would be nice if the sprite numbers to start over in each folder and sub-folder.

Um, and how exactly would you refer to a sprite in script if they didn't have unique numbers?

You can get high from children?!

Do you smoke them or inject them?

If we're to trust Hunter S. Thompson, eating their adrenal glands should do the trick.

KhrisMUC is spot-on with his explanation. To circumvent this issue, you might use a custom script for scrolling the screen. Check out Ali's smooth scrolling code from Nelly Cootalot.

- How can I make sure Matt sees it's an airship? 

How about also putting clouds below the ship? And also change the cloud behind the railing to not cover the entire width from the boat to the lighthouse, and to be less flat at the bottom (which currently gives the impression of a horizon line).

- How can I make the walls of the  house look more real? They're plastered walls, so drawing stones doesn;t make sense.

Put some cracks in, maybe even a part where the bricks are throwing through the cracked plaster.

Looks good. Are Elijah and Daneel a couple? Somehow Daneel looks incredibly gay with that tank top and the blue booties. I think you should work a bit on the skin tones though, because Elijah seems very pale next to the other guy. But maybe he's intended to be monochromatic compared to the flamboyantly colorful Daneel.

It's a skyship (like in Stardust), not a boat - hence no water.

This sounds plausible, if you change the image in the dynamic sprite it might well not refresh the GUI... there are probably other similar issues with using dynamic sprites in various places and then changing their content. Anyway, I'll get this one fixed.

Thanks, as I said in my edit above, I found the workaround of resetting the GUI.BackgroundGraphic to 0 before setting it to the DynamicSprite.Graphic, and that seems to do the trick, but this behaviour was a bit surprising. Though it's cool to discover that the GUIs are optimized not to update unless any value changes.

A minor thing, which I'm sure nothing can be done about: DynamicSprite.CreateFromScreenshot is horribly slow in windowed mode under the Direct3D drivers. Full screen is not a problem at all, though slightly more sluggish than DirectX mode. But in windowed mode it takes a second and half to open my savegame menu just because it's grabbing a 80x60 thumbnail screenshot.

Edit: The framerate drops by 5-10 fps when I run Direct3D in windowed mode anyway, so maybe it's just my graphics card.

Check out the Character Control Module demo to see an example of a LOT of characters moving around the screen without causing any slowdown.

3. Unfortunately you can't use external JPG files from within your game. The graphics all have to be imported into AGS which compresses them using its own lossless format.

4. Actually with the soon to be released version 3.0 it's been doubled to 30,000 sprites.

5. While the engine's own dialog editor has limits for how much text it can display at a time, Strings don't have a character limit. However, at least in v. 2.72 the script editor window has a limit  on how many characters you put on a line (around 500 I think, you can add line breaks, but they will also turn up in the printed string).

Have you tried accessing the Java website with other browsers (Internet Explorer, Opera etc.)?

The drivers you use doesn't change the game engine, so it should run the same on any computer (with the same setup as yours) using the new drivers, no matter which drivers it was developed with. The problem is with the drivers, not your game,  which you should be able to see by running any other AGS game using the same resolution/color depth as yours. Possibly the new drivers just don't support the resolution and color depth you're using.

Have you tried running the game with the 2x filters (selectable from the winsetup.exe menu)? It should allow the game to run in 1280x960 resolution which might be supported.

I think JBurger's edit, although I like it, changes the style too much. Your main concern SHOULD be the light, but you can do it much simpler and in a way that fits your style. First of all, work on the sidewalk shading, and turn the part that isn't lit up by the light through the laundromat window much darker. Also, darken the cars. If they are objects, that can be done with walkable area lighting.

I think it's a big improvement. The aliasing of the line on the awning still bothers me a bit. Maybe if you used some different colors, like a beige color on the edge of the white stripes and a lighter red color as highlight on the red it wouldn't seem so sharp.