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Since it's quite masterful (and also difficult to draw) sprite, I didn't edit it, just tried to fix the body geometry with some guidelines.

* head back about 5-15 pixels
* one shoe looking at the "camera", green arrows showÃ,  the direction shoe is facing at
* feet supporting now
* upper body more relaxed
* purple "X"s show place where normally fingertips should reach, but since you're going for cartoony look, it isn't very important

Indiana Jones? MacGyver? hm.
My hero should be strong AND smart.
MacGyver was a real wuss in fights, after knocking someone out with "u.s.-70's-tv-series'-weird-original-style-of-martial-arts-one-punch-per-baddie-move", he always moaned about his fist getting hurt...

so Indy it is.

And Hitler. And V.I.Lenin. (both tried to pick on enemy enourmous times stronger and succeeded, at least in the start - not to say simply - they were cases of one man making whole planet to pay attention in big time)

And Sherlock Holmes, of course, too!

Try reinstalling DirectX.
And - not the latest 9-series one, but directx 8.1 and not a version newer.

I've got a character that is set to have a static view until a global variable is changed, then he is going to continously run a loop until he's talked to, in which he will run a simple talking animation. When done talking to him, he will go back to his continous loop.

Hm. Hard to explain, but you need to put some script into "repeatedly execute" and "talk to character" events:
I'll try to make a plan how you should do it

character's room's repeatedly_execute script:
if (GetGlobalInt(int) == what)
{
SetCharacterview command to give character right animation
Animatecharacter - and use the repeating argument in this command, it was 1 or -1, don't remember exactly
SetGlobalint(int, some else value, to stop looping this part)
}

character script, interaction "talk to character":
Do the talking script/dialog
and Set the Globalint back to the value which forced character to loop the animation, so he starts animating again

Just draw whole room without a book and then draw book as different sprite, import it into AGS and put into room as an object. Objects can have their own walk-baselines too.

Or did you had book as separate object?
Then mess with its baseline. At some height, it should work.

Or if even THAT won't help - replan your room more carefully.

[fruit]

With "orange" I meant orange like fruit.

Her sides of face (especially her left, near mouth) look like really fat & old woman's feet!
I suppose it must like thin layers of hair on face or something, but it just makes her skin look old and fatty.

I really like what you did with her eyes, but mouth looks alot cuter in EGA version...

Huh. Looks good, really good. Plot sounds pretty promising and interesting enough too.
There's some tiny bugs which I encountered already, though, such as:

Spoiler

* Caretaker's door can also be locked with broomstick, despite game says that it was done with key
* Caretaker's door can be opened and closed many times and get points for each time
* Some logical bugs, such as walking through 7 floors by stairs in only 1 second?
* ah, the "unhandled event" is really annoying.

[close]

Also, it's bad that intro cannot be skipped (or is there way?)
And "look" function, which should be most important in any game (remember AGI games?) - is absolutely useless here...

Well, I'll update my post, whenever I have figured out how to

Spoiler

Get to the seveth floor without getting shot...
- I unplugged intercom
- locked door & cuffed/searched caretaker downstairs
- have wallet, gun, key and stick
- can't figure out why in the hell in this otherwise hotspot-poor game there are ads on the wall and cracks in the corridor?

[close]

ouch.

But... her nose is somewhat wrong.
And what's the deal with orange skin? (see: left and right cheek)

Try to shade sides of face harder, to remove flat look.

Change?
Definetly shoes & standing pose: He's not supported by his feet! His pose makes me think that soon the wind will blow him over.
Try a little more powerful stance.

Otherwise, hi-res look of the character looks... great!

about 80% of things ruled:

*just about enough of difficulty
*improved graphics, compared to first two games
*superb music
*pretty atmospheric and exciting story.
*a THIRD SEQUEL to an AGS game!
*non-linear plot
*many really good animations
Yeah!

but 20% sucked:
*some messed up bg's, especially with blur and color choice
*some lazy and non-existing animations where needed
*Despite suggesting same for first and second part, game STILL has no indicator pixel or crosshair on inventory items, which makes clicking difficult and annoying

Puzzle that is completeable with combination of things from inside and outside of the game... I really can't say that this is neither very good or bad idea. Some people avoid all kind of documentation outside the game. Then again, it adds some atmosphere even before starting to play.
Interesting idea, though. Haven't seen things like this for a long time.

I just took screenshots from both witch codes, pasted into MSpaint and copied the witch code translation pieces there too. Then, drew over every letter, according to the translation.
This was funny. I'm playing and adventure game in MSPaint 

Overall, great job!
Is fourth game started already?

Looks great so far... haven't played very far yet.

A bug!
When trying to go to balcony (or wherever that door at the bedroom leads to) - there's some problems with walk-behind area: some of railing & plants cover character.

** starting game again **

Hey I like your tune, but in the end I thought it was somewhat repetitive

**offtopic
Trance... repetitive... trance.
Lullabys are repetitive. Because repetitive and calm melody makes sleepy, relaxes, gives brain some rest, etc. Puts kids to sleep.

Trance is intended to work in similar way. Turn off brains while energizing body. Being in trance... sleeping... there's thin line between these two. That's the whole point.

**ontopic
Song is pretty good. This sawing-beepy-melody was exactly at the right place and at the right time.
Act1? 5 points for not using words "mind" or "dream" in the title

I didn't like this cat-meow'y sample though... but there's variety of tracks using similar samples, so I guess that goes with the style.
(If I could - had as much experience & skill), I would add some color into song. Some tension rising to the center (fast snare, loudering synths, whatever) and kicked main melody (the beeping one ) in with some not-jungley typical 144bpm bass drum beat (without snare!).

But then again, It would make song too various and weird.

Anyways,
super.

shaa-ding!
It looks like it's late evening or night outside.
Light should come from the window.
Cell is way too bright.

hm. And if you can "emulate" strazer's version already, there's way to go further:

It's about same thing, just more colors...

Image is way too small to have any detail with so less colors, so It would be wise to use more colors. Every pixels adds detail!

This isn't critics lounge here, but two things sucked...

* why didn't you use anti-glide mode? characters have really nice walkcycles - and letting them "slide" just wastes it.

* Argh! my eyes! Backgrounds really hurt eyes. Not bg's, but colors. there's too weird mixture of them. Too contrasty. Even some photshop saturation filter could do make it better.

Otherwise, it's a full game, so it rocks. I find story pretty intersting too.

** starts game again to finish it

There's a "modify" button on the top-left part on every your post, try this.

bah, I don't
1) LIKE
or neither
2) USE

Photoshop or any Adobe programs, well, Premiere only, sometimes.

PS is way too complicated and uncomfortable for me to make anything creative, after opening this painful program all I think about is how to get this mess closed and unloaded from RAM.


And as proven many times, the program itself doesn't mean anything. Artist's skills do.

SQ 4.5:
I have made few tutorials some time ago.

http://www.hot.ee/increator/draw.htm
http://www.hot.ee/increator/textures.htm

But since I have advanced alot and my "style" is progressed too, I'm planning to make another one in few next days: Trippin' needs some fresh bg's anyway, so there's no reason why i couldn't save image several times during drawing progress and add descriptions of what I did, later...

Wohoo, retro! Ã, 8)
Graphics remind me Hugo trilogy games.

It'll be a pearl, in my opinion, if you improve style/stuff as following:

1) show the real screenshots! I mean - NO JPG compression! Since there's very few colors, save all shots as GIF or PNG. (Just don't REsave these blurry jpg's, right?) (oh, and no GIF making in MS Paint!!! Get any other painting program to do that, like ArtGem for example (link in my signature))
2) if they ARE as blurry a seen here - take a hint: clean lines, ho! Style is good, but blurriness spoils it all.
3) Do not use MSPaint's default palette... even not it's custom colors! Never! This looks just sooo standard, boring and ugly. And too contrasty and overcolored and... Well, your rooms definetly need a more peaceful tone: like draw the background using different tones of cyan or beige or something. Not supercontrasty tones, but just by few RGB values differing ones.
4) You definetly have to improve the character. Do work and feel pain, but be accurate. This stairway looks like it's drawn by someone drunk and character's face ain't too good neither. I don't think that you cannot do better - it looks more like you didn't have willpower to work a bit harder. And this sucks.
5) More about character(s) -- there's loads of nice tutorials around, Ã, if you're having trouble drawing.

Thank you, thank you very much! Motivation is just the kind of thing I need right now.

But...
what's a Wip?