Messages

Fair enough, Misj.  I agree with your statements about long walkable areas, which is a result of remaking backgrounds from older games. Nowadays I think about backgrounds in terms of the least amount of scaling possible, so if I were to do any from scratch, I'd do the composition with that in mind.

As for the house, I'm not a big fan of the hard edges either. I think I'll go back and tweak those to see if it looks any better.

She'll be fine with whatever we go with.  I claim one of the king size rooms too!

Taking some of the advice into account, I tweaked the BJ2 background a tiny bit.

Yeah I'm trying to take things step by step. First step was getting my perspective right, since that was a BIG weakness of mine. Now I'm moving towards interesting composition as well as color balance. I notice that I tend to lean towards very muted colors, so I'm trying to play a bit more with complementary colors. In the BJ4 background I tried to get the warm glow of the lights to complement a sort of bluish tinge around the dark areas.

I agree that the hills are a bit too dark, so I went back and lightened them up a bit with a wash of the blue from the sky, which makes it look better.

Thanks for the feedback, it really is appreciated! Keep it coming

Nobody needs to worry about offending me. Like I said I still have a long way to go and I've only been practicing regularly for about a month now, so I myself will probably hate all these backgrounds soon enough!

I prefer the truth, and the comments so far have been very helpful!

Might as well move this to the Critic's Lounge. Mods, want to help with that?

[I am not remaking any of the games]

Hi all,

Forgive me if this thread is particularly self-indulgent, but I figured someone might get some amusement out of this. I've been tweeting this stuff, so if you've seen it, disregard this thread

So this year I decided to get better at art. Even though I've been making games for a while, I still have a lot of weaknesses in the art department. I decided to start practicing every day, and challenge myself to get better at drawing stuff that's given me trouble in the past. As part of this exercise, I've gone and revisited some of my old backgrounds, so far from the old Ben Jordan games. I still have a hell of a long way to go, but here's what I've done so far, accompanied by the originals so we can all laugh and wonder how I got away with such terrible stuff.

Also before anyone gets too excited, I am not remaking any of the games. The reason I decided to do this is because right now it's easier for me to practice with something I'm already familiar with rather than just draw something new. Hopefully this will inspire other people to practice more and get better!

Case 1



Case 2



Case 3



Case 4

My entry is a total wreck

Here's a new one for you, Fitz!

Episode 65

This is my first ever background blitz entry.

I'm high on life!

Good luck with your surgery, Fitz! I hope our dulcet voices help with a speedy recovery.

Episode 64!

The Art of Perspective by Phil Metzger

Happy New Year!

Episode 63

Apologies in advance to MiteWiseacreLives! for the cussing

Count me in for New Orleans. Also a +1

Scavenger:

Spoiler

First off, I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the game. I knew going in that this was going to be a hard sell, especially since it's such a niche time period, and let's be honest: the Florida Land Boom isn't going to make everyone excited.  It was an experiment for me to tell a story that was just a tragedy about a regular guy who goes through his mundane life and doesn't really get anywhere, but also I just wanted to immerse the player in the time period and show off a bit of local history, which interests me quite a lot.

Alfie isn't meant to be a sympathetic character at all: in fact, he's an idiot. He's an extremely naive goody two-shoes who wants to get to the top and winds up becoming corrupted and burning all his bridges. He was going to survive at the end, originally, but I didn't think he deserved to. That being said, the reason he didn't kill Fatty was because I was hesitant to make Alfie become a murderer: I figured it would make the player hate him even more. In hindsight, maybe I should have taken that risk.

In any case, I know this game has its flaws, but I'm happy with it and am glad it's being played. Thanks for your feedback, it's extremely valuable for me to learn from my mistakes.

[close]

I did! Thanks for posting that.

And now, for the Steam Holiday Sale, A Golden Wake is now 70% off!

Episode 62

Now that I'm home and recovered, I can again say what a fantastic time it was and how much I enjoyed talking to people and meeting AGSers and others alike.  (Although I also think we should have nametags, there were 1 or 2 people I knew would be there who I didn't get to meet - Shaun, sorry I missed you!)

I actually presented it at AdventureX on Saturday! Hopefully the presentation was filmed.