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I spent some time making pixels today. This is where I ended up...

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/HHQECCN.png[/imgzoom]
Here's one without background (for edits n such)
[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/Gf8ixZj.png[/imgzoom]

And forcefully 4x scaled because Chrome just sucks.


I'm not sure what to do with eyes. They just don't work. I've been arranging and rearranging pixels for quite a while, but it still doesn't feel quite right.
Also, bomber jacket looks like he's hiding litter of kittens under it, although that's actually quite possible in an adventure game
Any ideas?

To be honest, I am not sure what decreased amount of pirated production here: was that the law, or the cheaper internet & torrent trackers?

In Estonia, at least few years ago, you could buy new games sometimes more than 60% off the price if they were in Russian (russian localized & re-boxed), often published by 1C or some similar company. Since we have large russian gamer community here, they were sold in most game-related stores.
I always wondered how â,¬60 Call of Duty can be â,¬25 only because it's in Russian. While sold in respectable stores and those days when it's basically impossible to find pirate copies anywhere but perhaps flea market, I'm still not convinced those versions of the game were 100% legit. Price drop was just too unbelievable. But getting games so cheap might have played part.

For me personally, it was Steam. It's just so much more convenient than pirating nowadays. Except torrents don't make me regret all those shitty early alphas.

Old pen'n'paper method doesn't quite work for me if everything's digital and most of the things I need to remember are urls or copypaste bits of text or keywords to search for and so on.

Like if you market a game, you need to write reviewers and make forum posts. And you generally don't want to copy-paste same game description everywhere, so you'll make few versions of the text. And use this here and that there.
And you also have to remember which forums you registered at and so on. Also game ideas and code bits that might be useful some day... etc. So it's digital information I need to keep mostly.

Treeline looks interesting, thanks RickJ. I'm also exploring if Google Docs has advanced far enough from last time I used it (ages ago) - data in cloud and accessible from handhelds is always nice feature to have. Not for passwords and sensitive stuff though, but Google account is protected by password ANYWAY. Everything should beat notepad .txt files WinRARed with password, I think. Or perhaps nothing out there will.

Right, this is difficult to explain.
What I need is something that I can use to remember stuff. Like things I've subscribed via Paypal and pay some monthly fee. Passwords and CD-keys. Links I don't need daily in my bookmarks, but might need at some point in future.

OR for better example,
when I released Pall last year, it very quickly became evident that if you make accounts on every digital app store, make various threads in many forums and send e-mail to outlets and websites, you need to remember when and where you did those things, what did you write to whom, under which name you registered as and so on and so on. With even minor attempt at marketing, the amount of stuff to keep track of grows very quickly (out of hand).

First idea was e-mail. I've had same e-mail address for ages and I just kept relevant e-mails. From forums and sites and whatnot. Keeping old e-mail felt like a good idea, but I learned the hard way that e-mail is very fragile - some crappy forum gets overrun with spam bots, your e-mail goes into some spam list, and say bye to your e-mail. No spam filter will hold back the flood of crap you'll be getting every day and after some time, you'll just give up. Now I'm wiser and I have 3 e-mail addresses I use to sign up (why do we have to sign up EVERYWHERE those days?!), assessing by the importance and trustworthiness of the website. But e-mail isn't quite what solves everything.

So I've done this (or regretted not doing this) by making buttload of .txt files. They aren't all that good idea in retrospect, I would much more prefer something more... advanced. That can have alarms and reminders and tabs and search and organizing and stuff.
A personal organizer perhaps?

But something that's not just crappy Outlook Calendar that no one uses, but something cool, with some help with management and more suited to stuff I described above. Perhaps even encryption and password thingy to keep the Pandora's box closed.

Does something like this exist?
And yes, I know it's a bad idea to keep passwords in written form, but if you register in 40 forums in a single day, you kind of need it.

I never understood fishing unless you really like to eat what you catch. I know pretty well how to fish (father taught me) and some of my friends invite me to fishing trips, but I just don't get it. If I'm not eating them, why catch them? But I don't have moral qualms about killing fish - if I had a cat, I would gladly fish to feed it. Fishing games, however, feel like waste of time, just like snooker or bowling or whatever. It's wiser to do it in real life and benefit from social side of it or nature and fresh air or whatever.

Actually my thoughts are outdated.

Everyone loves Minecraft, a game with procedural worlds. All that's human there is algorithm that creates random world, but I see zero reason why good AI couldn't use even more advanced mathematics, coupled with wide (sampled) knowledge of nature to create much more immersive worlds. And amount of procedural games out there has been growing all the time. Isn't this machine art for human consumption?

Put simply, having all of the books, or art, or 54-pixel sprites possible is useless without knowing which sprite is the right one.  And if you know which sprite is the right one, it's a waste of time to search through all possible sprites. 

Isn't "right" defined by us and generally still by some common arguments? We all agree that snot and dirt is gross, three act story is exiting and one of the best ways to make fiction, brown and green do not go together well, and so on? Music is incredibly formulaic nowadays, I see zero reason why machines couldn't make trance or dubstep and tweak it to the perfection (because science of pleasurable melodies, chords and scales also exists and it's pretty universal. There was even a video few years ago where tons of pop songs are shown to have same melody). Also, with a learning machine, you can just let machine sample insane amounts of media AND it's ratings by people and draw conclusions. Think ratings on goodreads.com, imdb, amazon, beatport, imgur or even facebook likes.

One thing internet did, was letting us very precisely rate and review everything out there and we do it really, really much, basically laying guidelines for AI to learn from.

I'd suggest Itch.io - you can make it free or sell it, completely up to you.

On the Desura front... I think it's quite a big loss to the indie community.  In particular, their "Alpha Funding" idea was pretty innovative at the time.

Itch.io is perfect example why we don't really need Desura and why it's not all that big of a loss. Desura was cramped, too strict and outdated. Plus, it duplicated Steam, while Steam is already booming with indie titles.

Superintelligence?
I think it'll be just extremely, extremely good at optimization. So even if it's built by humans and fallible as us, it'll fix its own problems soon. Therefore, it won't be fallible at some point, and most definitely not driven to same motivations that drive humans. Survival instinct, emotion and so on. So, perhaps its only pre-programmed, firmwared motivation would be to serve humans. So why should it have any random or unknown alignment towards planet or humans? It'll be just a really cool computer that can do anything, invent stuff and answer questions. Also, a superior management tool, either for industry, banking or military.

It could devalue all art, because billion variations of Mona Lisa or whatever will be determined by time it takes paint to dry.

I've been thinking to program a simple brute force applet that fills 16x16 pixel canvas with all possible variations of all pixels of 54 colors of NES palette. Although this is really easy to code for even a beginner in any programming language...  mathematically I'm unable to calculate what insane time it would take to end its run (at current technology, millenniums?. In the end, you should have every sprite in those limits (Nintendo Entertainment System) ever drawn, and also all possible variations of everything. Mario with barrel for a head, Mario with feet of Peach and so on and so on.

Imagine something like this given at larger scale to a really powerful machine that is also superior at self-optimization so you wouldn't have millions of brute-forced images that make no sense (every pixel is black, now all is black, but one is white, so on), just all art ever created.

Music is also mostly maths and waves. Could we make AI brute force all music ever? All sound ever? At which point do machines start to make perfect things? Perfect as perfectly optimized for human consumption. Most captivating music, most tasty food (or best averaged for what we call difference of taste over human population), etc?

Art is ode to amazing human capabilities. So perhaps it'll demotivate instead of devalue, but still

I think only thing standing in our way is that learning machines use statistics. While it's good for machine to recognize images that doesn't have same checksum/color/angle/lighting/whatever as images of same thing, this also makes machines fallible and humans - yet - seem to ignore such little distinctions while getting correct answer, much better.

Hm. I don't feel like this game would benefit from jungle or haunted house theme, this isn't quite Zuma. The basic premise is somewhat physics-related. Original game had spacey feel and sci-fi-ish soundtrack.
Maybe neon-on-white feel like different header renders on my website? Feels like a Portal a bit to me?

[not]

Hi, CL over looong time!
I've managed to land myself into a bit of trouble. In July last year, I released a puzzle game named Pall. It was a logic game, roughly based on Laser Light (MS-DOS).
It looked like this:


As you can see, there's some stuff going on, but it isn't very clear if it's any fun or what's going on at all. Now see the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpbmHc4x8C8

Website for further interest

Trailer, despite breaking YouTube 15-second immersion rule, shows what goes on much better. It shows that everything's much more alive and animated than screenshots would suggest, that background uses parallax movement and so on. Sadly, despite being on every imaginable platform except iOS, Pall was absolute flop. I had 7000 players, and 6940 of them chinese pirates. While most of the problems lie in lack of (and inability to do) marketing (keywords Android + Puzzle fires all spam filters for every journalist, screenshots look boring) and my blue-eyed belief that "if there's a quality product, people are willing to pay for it" (they do not on mobile market!), I'm also not satisfied with graphic style, hence this thread.

I'm still not done with Pall. A sequel is almost done, but I want to lose the pixellated, lifeless retro look and actually make use of color wheels and theory, and make it look fresher.
While I originally liked my art direction of first game very much - and was close to taking it even further and make everything in glorious 4-color cyan-purple-black-white CGA, audience did not like even current look (from as little feedback as I got).

So, as title says, I need some advice. Ideas. Vision. I've been experimenting with barebone shapes and almost no colors (See video), but on static screenshots it looks even more lifeless.

Generally, Pall isn't very complicated game. There's only 20-or-so setpieces that should have stylized, recognizable look.



Some of the game pieces. Sorry, glass corner isn't very visible due alpha.

What I need is a way to draw them in a way where they are still recognizable, but look significantly better. I also decided to up the size from original 48x48 to 96x96 pixels (or even 128x128), so I can add more detail and upscaling on various devices hurts less.

Does this make any sense?

Sorry for the wall of text, I've been thinking about this problem for months now while rewriting engine and I'm getting quite desperate

Nice background! Only thing I'd do is this:


Brightness up by 15%
Contrast up by 35%

Right now it just feels too dark, and if your monitor doesn't have brightness cranked to the max, some details will just get lost. It also doesn't feel like sunny day being so dark.
EDIT: Also replace texture on dog kennel. It looks more like bad case of UV wrapping than wood/planks.
This background is excellent example of 3D not needing shadows, but I would experiment with more(?) Ambient Occlusion, if your software can do some. Some soft AO wouldn't break concept of no hard shadows nor make you need to add any to your character (which would be complicated, I guess).

Make and actually finish an adventure game over loooong time.
Most likely a fangame/heavily inspired by KGB, because that's something I've wanted to do for a decade by now, just never got to making it.
Won't be using AGS for this, though, I have good portion of the original engine made in Game Maker already.

It's actually a mystery why normal mapping in took 15 years to reach 2D games, while technology has been there so long and widely used in 3D. Advent of shader technology?
And why it's still basically at kickstarter/indie level, instead of being a norm

[absolutely green]

I tried Game Maker, but it looks too simple

wha-

I don't even understand what that means. GM can do everything, compile to everything, and no, it's not "too simple" at any level.
You probably looked at all those "make something do something" drag & drop icons and thought that that's all there is. Nope. Icons are to help absolutely green people, like schoolkids to get general idea what can be done and should be done.

Nobody doing anything serious or even semi-serious uses those. Only icon you ever need is "execute a piece of code".
Also, you can make your own AGS, with almost full functionality in GM in bare days. I don't think there's anything more powerful, logical and capable out there right now. GM has gone long way since 1999, just like AGS.

I suggest you to try again and dig deeper with GM. Youtube offers a good start, since GM is probably the engine that has most amount of tutorials, examples and otherwise resources out there. Even more than Unity.

That, indeed, look like an awesome cover mockup.
Thanks

[emboss]

Why does emboss filter exist in graphics software?

I kind of understand what it does and where does it get its name, but "it makes stuff look like it's embossed into metal" doesn't sound either practical at any level or situation, nor does it look good enough to be one of must-have vanilla filters.

...or is it just "Hello World!" of shader/filter programming? Pixel processing logic seems simple enough...?
What am I missing?

Pesakond (litter/brood) is sometimes quite funny, although it's pretty random--
It's about rude alcoholic woodland animals



Hedgehog: I wanted to tell you something, but forgot
Wolf: Well, fuck off then
Hedgehog: Exactly what it was! Fuck you too
Wolf: Share a taxicab?



Wolf: We could praise the Bear for a change?
Hedgehog: Yeah
Rabbit: Bear, get your ass over here!

Wolf: You made it so quickly!
Hedgehog: Yeah
Rabbit: Well done, now fuck off

[that guy]

You made me think that their was an Elder Scroll movie, now I am disappointed.
Someone should pay that guy who made the LotRs film trilogy to make some fantasy film(s) based on TES. Or maybe we could have a TV series.

Yeah, that guy, what a fine choice.
Elder Scrolls: Trip from Leyawiin to Anvil while nothing happens, spun over 6 seasons of TV show

Re-enacting this in game would at least have occasional wolf or khajiit robber to slay, in addition to fine music and scenery

Coming back to the real topic, I cannot understand what people liked about Oblivion, the movie. I found it mediocre sci-fi at best, even though gfx was really pretty at times

Now how exactly is selling hope for better future a fraud?

Spoiler

isn't that what every major religion, ever, does?

[close]

Especially if it comes with awesome sticker or key chain?
And you cannot really go for truth and start Indiegogo project named "Stress & Planetary Guilt relief for 7K"
Those 286 or whatever people want to feel that they made a change and helped towards better planet.
I think they got what they paid for, no matter if he succeeds to pick up a physics textbook or not

I'd fund this project if he'd die mysteriously. But then again, it wouldn't be of any use anymore.