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Nice choice! It's 'Adventures of Prince Achmed' by Lotte Reiniger, a wonderful silhouette-animated film from 1920s, right?

Have you seen Michel Ocelot's "Princes and princesses", by the way? I think it's the only other silhouette film that comes close to Achmed.

Chicky: looking great! I love the soft colours and precise pixel art, good luck with that release date! 

To be fair, that's how it was handled in most 2d RPGs, it's a perfectly common practice. And they do look nice, so well done on that. Now it's a question of implementing them in the game in a sensible, balanced way.

Yes, terribly, terribly familiar process.
With me it's usually a mix of ProgZ's and Eggie's versions, only with less crying and more despair.

This thread does cheer me up, though! So much wonderful stuff! Let's see...

Kastchey: I love your expressive, rough, painterly style! It's very dynamic and balances between abstraction and detail well.

Andail: While relatively simplistic, it looks really, really great! I want this game already!

Ali: This is, obviously, truly impressive. You've developed a very distinctive, interesting and beautiful visual style for Nelly. I think her eye looks a bit strange, though. And hooray for the maneki-neko!

Adder: This is probably my favourite thing in the topic! Cannot help but love the Bladerunner-y stuff, and judging by the art from your website, which I loved, this is only going to get so much better. Can't wait to see more!

It's a great day to be an adventure game fan! I've been waiting for this since forever, looking forward to playing it at last!
Congratulations on finally releasing it, wish you a big success!

Anian: Thanks! The animations are fluid! Both of them! (not really, but the animations are quite sparse)

Ben: Indeed, no idea what I've been waiting for. Thanks.

Armageddon: Thank you! No, it's a different game from the one in Release Something thread, but they may or may not be connected in some way. (I'm not being cryptic, I just haven't decided if they are yet )

Chicky: Thanks! I like the goldfish too. In fact, I like it so much that it has 20 frames of animation (fluid!), not just four
And nicely spotted on the title - indeed, there's more than 2 backgrounds in this game. Not by much, though.

Patchwork is a short fantasy point-and-click adventure. It will [hopefully] be a part of Summerbatch.

After a teleportation experiment goes wrong, a young scientist finds himself, and a good part of his laboratory, in someone else's house. In a parallel universe.

Features:

- Two playable characters

- Hand-painted graphics at an astonishingly non-retro 800x600 resolution

- Simple two-click interface

- Minutes of gameplay

Release date: July 2012.

Very nice and charming little game, well done! The art style is nicely minimalistic and reminded me of diesel sweeties webcomic a bit, which is always a good thing in my book. I also liked the idea of modules, even though it wasn't really fleshed out here.

Looking forward to seeing more games from you in the future!

Just listened to it - good stuff! Really looking forward to the next one!

Also - rotoscoping is the best. I think He-Man proved that.

[Figure Drawing for All it's Worth]

Figure Drawing for All it's Worth by Andrew Loomis
ISBN-13: 978-0857680983
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Figure-Drawing-All-its-Worth/dp/0857680986/

This one's a classic - it's very coherent, covers most of the basics and features lots of masterful illustrations. If you want to learn how to draw the human form in a realistic way - this book is a definite must.

His other books, like Successful Drawing and Creative Illustration are very good as well, and even cover a little more ground, but tend to stray too much into the 50s-style adverts territory. Which I think is awesome in a way, but, obviously, not very handy for our modern times.

Oh, man, I love Release Something threads (has it really been a year already?)! Hope to see much more awesomeness here!

So far - "Troopers" looks adorably charming and "Dead Silent" looks spectacular;
"The Thought Saved for Last" sounds very intriguing and unusual;
Also, it's great to see that the new Blackwell game is in development, and with graffiti to boot!

And, speaking of graffiti, here's a very-WIP screenshot from a game I've been working on a little while back and plan to come back to after I'm done with another super-secret project (that I'll announce real soon).

Yay! Great to see this back on track, looking splendid!

This actually sounds pretty good on paper, but it's hard to tell if you're really that interested in making good pancakes, rather than in hyping your yet non-existent cookbook App (with extra downloadable recipes) and posting cool looking pictures of pancakes made by someone else. People don't want downloadable recipes and fake pancakes threads that prove a point in a sort of meta way, they want PANCAKES! I'm sorry to say this, but so far I haven't seen you make a single pancake, and no pancakes isn't delicious at all. If you can show us at least once that you can really make a proper pancake - everyone will thank you, I'm sure.

P.S. I really want some pancakes now, if this thread will really become a thread about pancakes it would be awesome.

P.P.S. In Russia we call pancakes blini and often serve them with caviar.

I think these are some of your best graphics to date - both sprites and backrounds! The colour palette is absolutely gorgeous and a bit more complicated than usually, so well done there, I'm quite jealous of your learning curve! The plot sounds intriguing too, so I'm very much looking forward to this, good luck!

P.S. Nice title 

[Idea:]

Idea: Misj' - nice humorous take on the topic, and altough I'm a sucker for dark sci-fi cityscapes, it's also good to know that some people can manage to creatively weasel out of drawing one.
Atmosphere: Pinback - a very close one between Pinback and gameboy, since they both have a very strong ambiance. I decided to vote for Pinback here, because his vision is more unusual.
Functionality:  Misj' - not much of a competition here, since this background is absolutely perfect for pointing, clicking and walking around and the others - not so much.
Technique: gameboy - it's minimalistic, but pitch-perfect.

Splendid news! I was really looking forward to this project for a while now (dark art-nouveau-esque post-apocalyptic steampunk retro point-and-click adventure? I mean, really!), and was beginning to worry it will be in development forever. Well, now that WEG are onboard I can finally learn to stop worrying and love Primordia, thanks!

I'd say that what makes a bad game is not the flaws, but the lack of anything good, and so it's no wonder that there are a lot of very flawed games that manage to find their place in our hearts because of what they got right. And what is "right" is very much a matter of opinion, hence the Sierra bashing/loving.

Personally, I'd pick Sierra over Lucas Arts any day of the week, even though I'd admit that LA released more great games. It's just that none of them are as special to me as Quest for Glory 4 and Gabriel Knight are. I've never finished a single KQ game, but at least I enjoyed playing them (parts 2, 5 and 6). Which brings me to an embarassing confession of my own - I haven't finished any of the Monkey Island games, because I didn't really like anything about them. I tried my best to fall in love with them, but failed miserably every time. Is there something wrong with me?

One of the problems with making the players 'think for themselves' in games is that while in real life there is a single universal set of rules that every human being is more or less familiar with, every game has it's own inner logic. And figuring out how each particular game works is an additional challange. You're not only interacting with the enviroments, but with the designer of the game. So it's sometimes necessary to push the player in the right direction and hold his hand - not to make the game easier, but for the player and the designer to be on the same wavelength.

I have no idea how to implement deductive reasoning without the use of notes or keywords, but to make the player think for himself more, you have to give him some freedom within the game. Here are some of the ways to do it:

- Text input - googling, searching through phonebooks [for the address of the hotel from where the matchbox comes from] or even answering questions like "Who is the murderer?" is a nice way to make the player pay more attention and maybe even write notes. It also makes trial-and-error a bit tougher.

- Non-linearity, choices and time limit (The Last Express did that quite interestingly) - for example, after inspecting a crimescene you have to make a choice - going to the house of suspect A or suspect B. If you've made the right decision you'll get some additional clues. This obviously requires a lot more work and can lead to dead-end situations, though.

- Allowing to pick up useless items. I remember collecting a full inventory of mugs and plates in the beginning of "Dreamweb". I think it was a very interesting, although slightly crazy, approach, especially given the bad case of kleptomania that every point-n-click gamer suffers from.   But that way you have to decide for yourself what's useful and what's not, what is a clue, and what is just a red herring. It's a bit extreme, but can be a fun gimmick for a small game.

I love Snarky's idea of reenacting the crime - it's pretty unconventional and as such will force you to think at least slightly differently to the usual "What do I use on what?" scheme.

Also, some RPGs made good use of trials (I think Neverwinter Nights 2 had a great courtroom sequence), which rely on long strings of arguments and the fact that you have only one attempt to prove that someone's guilty or not.

Yes, hooray indeed!

Seriously though, the Bake Sale was awesome in every way, great job you guys, you've made the world a slightly better place!

Well, what exactly are you having trouble with? It's a pretty easy effect to achieve, especially if you're not bothered about it beign correct. Just paint some beams of light from the corners of the window and drop some light on the bed (it's better to do it on a separate layer), then erase some of the light on the bed where there will be shadows from the vertical planks and voila. You can mess around a bit with the layer's opacity and blending mode to get a result you like.

I'd also advise on paying more attention to the light sources - you have a window and a lamp here, but they have almost no effect on how the things in the room are lit - they simply glow a bit, while in reality they should define all of the shapes around them. It's a pretty nice-looking background, though.


Here's a 5-minute edit: