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No. I hate this graphic style. The sight of those arcs and splines makes me sick. It looks like a draughtsperson had a stab at doing artsy design or even worse: Those icons could be generated by a trained AI. This is indefinitely more abhorrent than ham-fisted dilettantes using Paint with a flaky mouse.

I second that opinion. It looks super artificial. Of course, if you color it really well, it might look a lot better.

Looks absolutely fantastic! Can't wait!

320x200 is pretty arbitrary thing to follow. I mean, why care, unless you go super duper retro?

I'm making Born Punk in 384x216 -- strictly because it scales well with 1:1 pixel aspect ratio and integer scale.

5X for 1920x1080, 6x for 4K. Resolutions heavy majority of players will have. And original size is still pretty close to 320x200.

Since October 2018, I teamed up with Youtuber and streamer Falko von Falkner to develop a point'n'click adventure game.
He's doing the writing, planning and marketing, I do the pixels. There's also Jean Czerny who's doing the big art, promotional gfx, so on.
It's set in Bornholm, Denmark in 2155, and it's a story about transhumanism and rogue AI.

We're running a Kickstarter campaign in hopes to be able to afford quality sound assets/VO and more features than initially planned.
So far, there's quite a lot of interest and initial goal got funded in mere 24 hours, which is quite fantastic.

There's also a downloadable demo for Win/Mac/Linux.

I'd tell more, but campaign describes it well enough - see for yourself.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/insertdisk22/born-punk-a-cyberpunky-classic-point-and-click-adv

I like the pixel version but It's a waste to use it since your high-res is so detailed.

I'd say go with contrast on the first image, make ground a bit darker, reduce bloom on windows a bit and make windows cast some light on the ground for realism

[some]

Gobliiins series (by Coktel Vision), while they do have some text, hardly need any. Everything is expressed by faces and motion anyway.

Pretty much what title says. Games like Police Quest 3 or Quest for Glory had it, yet I've never noticed any difference. Skipping animation frames maybe?

KGB aka Conspiracy (1992 I think, PC/Amiga)

creepiest adventure game I've played, ever. Pretty punishing, too

Given the size of the trunks, one would imagine trees span 25 screenfuls upward and canopies take two screens horizontally. Such trees couldn't grow that close to each other.
* Make trees narrower
* Make trunk less cone-shaped and more like cylinders. Roots are rarely that big, except for some tropical species
* Make road about half narrower (vertically)
* Lose outlines on road
* Add grass, like visible green growing things, instead of just green blur
* Use grass to soften road shape and where trees enter ground

Turns out, (as I suspected,) it's highly technical (as most computer- and art-related things are) and not all that complex.
After hours of googling, I ended up watching this video which breaks it down in absolutely wonderful and simple manner (and has results to back it up).

So it's just about playing with HSV with pretty specific and highly learnable manner.

Watch a lot of standups. Old Sierra games had tons of observational humor just like stand-up comedies do.

You could also "borrow" some adventure game classics (Thimbleweed Park brought entire library of those back), such as

* Dialog option is too ballsy and character actually says something else
* Character is patronizing other in dialog ("I'm selling those fine leather jackets" type of stuff)
* Dialog is never-ending (Guess the color/wheel of fortune number puzzles and many, many others from MI2)
* etc. Any Lucasarts game will give you tons of those examples

And of course, you can just play funny games and get ideas and into the funny mood. Ruin is pretty funny AGS game, for example. So is YAPnCA and so on.

My pixel art has always been colorful and high-saturation contrasty colors, similar to old arcade games (my heaviest influence in life are all those 1990's Neo-Geo fighting games).
Yet, I want to learn the low saturation mode.

Is there like some supreme guide to choosing low saturation or palette composition or how? A link everyone's been sharing or class everyone took? Or some rules of thumb, mathematical formula or something?

Using eyedropper on some others' work, I find colors that go just "yuck" in my head and would never been my first choice, yet they look so pretty when sprite comes together.
How to convert to low saturation and improve my color knowledge?

I have no idea how to google it, so I'll ask here.

So I want to go from this...


...to this


How do I handle the palette? I look at it, what do I have to see?

Absolutely loving it!
Some hints could appear here and there though. Reached to the very end and... it took me almost an hour to figure out the portrait. Red herrings in inventory didn't help either.

Looks awesome!
Mandana reminds me of Sinclair from Art of Fighting 3. And that boat scene Prince of Persia 2.

A question though, what is this weird base art resolution you're using? It looks too pixellated to be 640x480 yet I don't recall 320x240 being able to pack so much detail on single screen?

Not bad!
Last video is pretty good...
But

• The foggy thing gets too close to camera, causing disco lights
• The ship doesn't move smoothly
• I'd let everything render at 30 fps for smoothness and reduced blinking
• I don't know how anti-aliasing works in Blender, but you need a lot more than you currently have. And probably a different algorithm (I think it's very weak Gauss right now or is there none and that's just Youtube's compression?). That's causing problems too.
• You can cut off a ton of workload... by making entire thing just a minute shorter. You have 30 seconds of disco, then an entire minute of ship jerking around.
  Make it 30 seconds total, and get to the point (your fantastic model of the ship) quicker. It's easier to get more quality out of it then too

Missing at least 50 hotspots and 100 lines of dialogues. Empty ginormous rooms.

Have you played Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? Loom?
I always thought lack of hotspots was LucasArts handwriting. Sierra games let you look at basically every pixel in the room.
It is logical to have less if your game is full talkie, you wouldn't do billion lines of voiceover for things that don't advance story (although many players love adventure games for pure exploration).
Lack of hotspots also make game much, much easier. And this isn't very difficult game to begin with. Probably not intended so. Open-world thing makes it messy too.

Other than that, it's nicely done but pretty mediocre so far, in my opinion. I wish they went for more realistic graphics, such as Loom or MI2. 12-verb UI should have stayed in the past, Full Throttle handled it much more elegantly -- why go back?
Ghost character feels like direct ripoff from Blackwell series. Either they didn't do research into modern games thoroughly or they did... both probabilities are disappointing.

Haven't finished it yet, but way over halfway.
While story has clearly gone to hell, and even beginners here make more believable walk cycle animations, I just wish to admire more of those marvelous backgrounds.
And despite pixel size problems, usage of shaders make it up a lot in my book. Not sure, but I suspect those wavey ghost modes and all would just look horrible with original pixel resolution.

[want]

I have always assumed that illegal immigrants mostly get jobs that citizens don't want. So your statement that they're "taking jobs that real citizens could do", while not factually wrong if taken at face value, sounded like you're implying they're taking those jobs away from citizen that absolutely would do them.
Was that your intended meaning or not?

It's probably more about de-valuating those jobs. Or rather, their pay.
So those aren't jobs "real" citizens do not want, but jobs they wouldn't do at offered pay rate. If immigrants will accept any payment, it's unclear if they're exercising or instead, obstructing the way free market works.
And if they're immigrants, from national viewpoint, it's the latter.

While sprite upscaling over backgrounds looks a bit weird, It definitely looks fantastic nevertheless!
I get Gabriel Knight vibe from those shots.
Unless text appears over portraits' heads, positions of talking heads looks a bit strange too.

Waiting

[Did you dodge making a walkcycle?!]

Haven't tried it yet, but looking from screens--
Did you dodge making a walkcycle?!

I think I figured this out: made head smaller and now I can get away with no visible eye elements at all


Also fine-tuned shading on bomber jacket and general proportions