Messages

[Idea]

Really hard to choose, everything is so different and lovely in it's own right!

Idea - oraxon - quite an unexpected, interesting "closed" location idea
Atmosphere - Mordalles - dark, creepy and very thick
Design - loominous - cute and simply awesome
Composition - Mordalles - it's a real game background
Technique - loominous - love the soft colours and the contrast on this one.

Just finished it - great game! Enthralling plot, superb atmospheric backgrounds, tense, engrossing and well-paced gameplay, it sucks you right in! I enjoyed it a lot, probably one of the best adventure games in recent years, along with the Blackwell games.

Thanks, Joshua, hope to see more of your games in the future (and preferably set in the future - I loved the Cowboy Bebob/Bladerunner vibe)!

And thanks to Dave, for helping it get released in such a well-polished state. Wish you both the best of luck with the sales and future projects! Cheers!

I like it! Moody and futuristic. I can't figure out what's going with the first guy's legs too, but the figures here are quite lively and realistic. Perhaps, the second guy's arm seems a bit short, and he's quite small himself.

I think you nailed the style and palette perfectly, my only suggestion would be to add a few more(one or two) pink accents, maybe as some sort of badges on the police uniforms, so that the terminal at the back doesn't grab the viewer's attention that much (unless that's the plan).

Anyway, I really like where this is going, well done!

Yes, slightly moronic indeed, I did not want to see that during lunch

Everything works perfectly smooth on my laptop too, fullscreen, no cropping, animated loop in the background, walking shark-person-thingy...

Smooth 3d characters like that would definitely fit perfectly in JDHD, best of luck with that and keep us informed.

Mordalles, that's great! You've oversized it a little, but the non-scaled version looks splendid!

Mad, interesting stuff, I like the concept!

Mine didn't turn out quite like I wanted it to, probably due to poor composition, but, nevertheless, here it goes:



An office at the top floor of the Victoria Heights building in New Brussels, year 1919 in an alternative universe. Heavily inspired by architecture of Victor Horta. Obligatory retro-futuristic zeppelin outside the window is not included.

Just finished it, and it was great! The artwork is better than ever, late-night radio show and overall night ambience works wonderfully (escpecially since it's 4:30 AM here right now). All the details about the splendid game world are very welcome, and The Clash reference in the title made me smile.

The story itself is really sweet and oozes with indie kindness and warmth. The characters are also sweet, cool and very contemporary, which is always a plus in my book.

All the songs were fun to listen to and of surprisingly high quality, and they lasted me exactly through the whole game. Although I think it could've been even cooler if the songs were done by a larger variety of people, through some sort of contest or something like that.

I'm sure the episodic format will suit you perfectly, and we'll get a great adventure out of it. Best of luck with part 2 and thanks for such a lovely game!

Also, those tilde-thingies, that I assume represent airwaves, are quite cool.

Yes, Wacom tablets are considered to be the best pretty much by everybody. I've been using a similar, but older wacom model for about 5 years now and I haven't got a single complaint so far.

Ouxxey, I mostly just paint in Photoshop with standard brushes, but here I started by tweaking the colors with "Replace color" tool, and that resulted in this cool dirty layered effect. So it was partly accidental, and I'll probably won't be able to repeat it myself. But I think you can do better clouds, than on my edit. Try looking at some references. (Great tip, I know, sorry ) I'd also suggest romanticism-era paintings, they loved dark dramatic clouds, them romanticists.

Overall I like the style, it has a great dark sci-fi feel to it, and close-ups are really underused in 2d games lately. Is it Latha, by the way? And I'm also very curious about the comic that inspired it.

First of all, when doing black&white you have to be very careful where to draw a line, and where to leave the place blank. And the choice should be based not only on how dark the area in question is, but on the contrast with the adjacent area. Also, varying the thickness of the lines is very important for simulating lighting and emphasizing the shape.

Then, because of the semi-realistic style, the background looks a bit boring and too plain - more randomness wouldn't hurt.

Anatomy is obviously a big issue here, but I'm very bad at it myself, so I can't really recommend anything apart from always using a photo-reference. All comic book artists do it!

Still, I tried to do a quick dirty paintover to address some of the issues:


And then I noticed that it's not really black and white, but black and very light purple, which reminded me of Paul Pope's comic book "Heavy Liquid", where he uses a very limited palette to evoke a dark dystopian sci-fi atmosphere(very similar to Technobabylon's, btw), whilst keeping the b/w aesthetic. So I "borrowed" this palette, and applied it here:

I have a lot to say on the subject, lots of things to disagree with, quite a few to agree with, too, but it'll be quite hard for me to write that much in English, so I'll just point out some of the things that bothered me in this well thought out, and, in a way - sweet post.

You talk about visuals as a technical part, and about story and ideas therein as "content" that matters. Well, I consider visual art, as well as music, to be more interesting, complex and pure forms of art than literature. They are indispensable for creating a unique, singular experience from a mixed media project, be it a movie, an opera or a game.

Super Mario colour pallette alone, beign instantly recognizable and quite weird, creates a whole new visual space for the player to immerse himself in, and thus evokes many new emotions that are hard-to-impossible to find anywhere else.  Pixel art is a valid and relatively new genre of visual art and should not be taken lightly. I feel that interesting and innovative use of visual design is highly underused and underrated.

As for what goes on in the Critics Lounge - well, most of us have some experience in thinking and writing. We are taught those things from an early age and do them on a daily basis, so there's much less need to go through the basics. Not many, however, can draw a table, so that it looks like a table. Rules of linear perspective are still very much alive and kicking if what you want is to create a good visual representation of a real object.

And I think that all this "wallowing in retro spirit" stuff is caused not only by nostalgia, but partly because we, gamers, feel that the whole pixel-art/adventure thing haven't been properly done yet, it didn't reach it's full strength and was abandoned by the industry way to quickly. We feel that there's still much artistic potential in those blocky semi-abstract shapes and in the passive, observational type of gameplay. Or, maybe, that's just me.

Okay, I seem to have started to ramble a bit, and it's way too preachy, so I'll cut the rest of it short:

- Games are mostly entertainment. Entertainment can become art if it's done well enough. (The Simpsons are way more culturally significant than a Ming Vase or a Penderecki symphony)
- Games are hard to make. Especially for one person. Especially complicated, never-done-before kind of games.
- Non-linearity of games seems to create loads of opportunities for new forms of artisticic expression, but so far, not many have been found.
- The overall quantity of games of reasonable quality from this community, although surprisingly great and lovely, is insufficient to make such  broad observations and wish for more.
- How about a more constructive and in-depth thread on actual possibilities and ideas for experimentation within the medium? (not a dare, but a suggestion - let's discuss the subject itself, and not why it's not discussed and implemented in ags-games).

oraxon, that's great! Love the ambience and DOF effect. Quite unusual for a background, but it could've been a great scene in a game.

Will try to enter this one, like the theme.

However, Do you have a way to provide it without the light rays? I process them separately, still because of the animations.

Nope, sorry, did it all on one layer. But I think it'll be pretty easy to paint them over. Good luck!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe there's almost a universal rule about natural landscapes, according to which the value distribution is always like this, from the lightest to the darkest: sky -> horizontal plane -> vertical objects like trees, houses etc. And here it's quite the opposite.

Here I tried to light up the sky and darken the house a bit:


I'm not sure if that's an improvement, because the original version has a great bleak atmosphere, but i thinks it's more natural. The same goes for the other background. Hope it helps, but they are great already.

[Idea]

I like all the entries, and it's great how diverse they all are, but zyndikate's is simply wonderful in every way. So,
Idea - oraxon
Atmosphere - zyndikate
Design - zyndikate
Composition and functionality: - zyndikate
Technique - zyndikate

[Idea]

Idea - Oraxon
Atmosphere - Mordalles
Design - loominous
Composition - Mordalles
Technique - Mordalles

Whatever happened to the functionality category? Feels kinda important.

It's included in Composition now. I merged them when I was hosting, because I felt that it's impossible to think of the composition of a game background without considering it's functionality (if the composition of a game  background isn't suitable for a game - it's a bad composition, even if it looks good). So it's more like I was trying to get rid of Composition category, rather than Functionality, because it falls somewhere between Design and Technique. I also like odd numbers.

Great stuff! Really well thought out, lots of nice and interesting details, cool and diverse puzzles, engaging story, involving characters, dense atmosphere, edgy subject matter and all that goody-goodness. And what's always important - a great, yet subtle sense of (black) humour.

In short - I enjoyed it quite a lot, thanks! Will definitely "See you in Part III".

Nice tutorial, thanks! Basics, but all the most important ones.

And is it my imagination, or the sample background is eerily similar to the one I did a while back?

I didn't do that much mistakes!

[Idea]

Idea - Pinback
Atmosphere - Pinback
Design - oraxon
Composition - oraxon
Technique - Pinback

I kinda wanted to use a scene from Blackadder as my entry-

Percy: "Could it be m'lord, that I hold here in my mortal hands a nugget of purest green?"

But that would've taken time, and patience- of which I have niether!

I will never forgive you for not doing this.

You are dead to me now.

Agreed. We hate you now. Still, a great underwater backgound. And it's not brown.

[ProgZmax]

Okay, that's it then!

Really hard to choose between Sughly's and ProgZmax's very different, but equally splendid entries, but since I have to...

The winner is... ProgZmax! Congratulations!
And "The Burning Skulls" win the most useless trophy a musician can have - a Grammy! 

Thanks for participating, everyone!

BrutalSlakt, love the idea - a giant jellywish is well suited to play the piano.

Just a few days left, if someone needs a little more time - don't hesitate to ask.