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The bounce looks a little out. To be honest, on a sprite of this small size, bounce isn't really that necessary, but you should have him bounce in frame 3 and 8 (going off the sprite sheet at the top of the page). They are really the point at where the characters body would be at it's lowest due to leg positioning.

Quick question... what makes this character 'cyberpunk'? He doesn't really have any characteristics I'd associate with cyberpunk. He's just got some flashy headphones. an electronic device on his shoulder and a nifty barcode design on his t-shirt.

That said, the sprite looks better than the source material. *edit* I like the proportions better 

Welcome back.

Maybe one day you'll actually attend mittens.

We are one team member away from the return of all the team members of The Vestibule. You know who you are... (shifty eyes)

Wow, I'm impressed by the screenshots, I have to check this out.

The world needs a proper 3D Adventure Game Engine, and this project looks like it might just take that crown.

BTW Jakerpot, Milkshape exports to SMD's so you will have no trouble using Milkshape to create 3d characters. I don't really know how well MS handles shader support if at all, but for not so complex 3d characters, it may suffice.

Or if you own HL2 you can get the Softimage XSi mod tool.

I think the graphics style is neat. It's also interesting that you used an overlay instead of just having it on the background. It will make for a much better effect when fully animated.

Any ideas on how you will pursue the animation side of things? All I can see right now is an unchanging static silhouette. Keeping it like this or are you going to detail the character. I personally like the silhouette effect. Very mysterious.

- There is no nudity
Therefore it's hopeless

Yeah, 3D rendered breasts really excite me in the loins as well...

PERVERT

The nude women in LSL:MCL were awful. Somewhere in between the realism of a $2 blow up doll and a realdoll. And since realdolls have the face of death on them, it wasn't titillating, it was zombiefying.

I really can't see what you are aiming for.

And if you are looking for art help, the critics lounge is the place to be, not Adventure Talk and chat.

Heh, funny you should mention this. I had this thought to get some of the AGS art wizards to create a bunch of tutorials on various subjects like background creation, composition, sprite creation, animation, palette creation for low-resolution sprites (somewhat like a basic colour theory, concentrating on skin tones and complementary colour schemes for sprites). It would be a pretty intensive project to undertake, I would be willing to make a tute or two for a project of this scale. Something like an all inclusive AGS creation 'book'.

Light blue doesn't scan or photocopy well. That's why.

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/default.aspx?c=fi&l=fi&s=gen&~ck=cr

The Dell website in Finnish apparently. This is where you would get one from. Not sure of their prices.

As I mainly concentrate on pixel art as well, I am not 100% sure on what technique is best.

That said...

I have in the past done rough animation using a wacom and photoshop. I just use a relatively hard brush, use blue (an animators favourite colour) to roughly sketch out the frames. For a walkcycle, usually one would draw the CONTACT, RECOIL, PASSING and HIGH-POINT poses first and then draw the tweens (in-between frames). For other animation, a similar process is used. You draw the main poses and inbetween. I'm not going to go THAT deeply into animation techniques in this post to be honest, just some basic info.

How many frames a walkcycle should have is up to the animator. Too few will look jerky, too many will be toooooo slow. AFAIK, most agser's use between 8-12 frames for each direction, not including the standing pose.

Ok, I kind of went off topic there, but hey, it's all helpful.

If you are planning on using 'traditional hand-drawn' animation for your game, I would recommend you either use a light-box and a scanner, combined with a wacom tablet, using flash and photoshop (or equivalent). When flash exports to .png it will automatically generate an alpha channel, which ags can use for antialiased edged sprites. EG. they will look nice.

Alternatively, you can skip step 1 and draw directly into the computer using a Wacom and Flash (using a layer for your base).

I personally find drawing on paper easier than drawing directly, but it is up to you and up to what you feel most comfortable with.

As for the scanner, unless you decide to go professional, any all-in-one inkjet printer will have a scanner. The dpi is not perfect, lines aren't as crisp, but since you are going to draw over them in flash anyway, you are really just using the lines as a base.

Another thing you could do is animate on paper using a lightbox, ink over your drawing, scan, then convert the line-art to vector in Flash then colour.

A current example of a game that uses the hand-drawn technique is Emerald City Confidential (ok so it's not out yet...). I think the artist used Flash for the animation in that.

What should be avoided is making a character using separate limbs and just animate those limbs. There are advanced techniques for covering this up in Flash, I sort of know how to do this, but I'm not even 50% sure of the best way.

I'm sure someone like loominous would be able to suggest ways of doing this.

Quick question, have you animated before?

It may be worth your while doing a lot of practice and perhaps giving pixel art and exercise book flip animations (my teachers hated these! Oh the violence!) a go before you try anything as complicated as traditional animation.

As for references, try The Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams. It is known as the Animators bible, and for a good reason too. Even accomplished animators refer back to it from time to time.
http://www.amazon.com/Animators-Survival-Kit-Richard-Williams/dp/0571202284

Great Walkcycle tute here as well. Probably the best.
http://www.idleworm.com/how/anm/02w/walk1.shtml

Despite what you may think, the Colasshole does not taste like chocolate. It tastes a bit nutty.

John Green did the backgrounds. Great artist and a really nice guy. I suggest you check out his website. He does comics too. I haven't really read them, but from what I hear they are really great. I almost wet myself when I saw his line renditions of NYC. So so lovely.

http://www.johngreenart.com/

If we are lucky, he might say hello.

Dave is lucky to know talented people who are passionate about his games and love to help out. For the green stuff naturally.

The character animations in ECC are so so nice as well. I'm not sure what the actual artist is like as a person, so we will just leave it at that, hey? :p

Can't wait to see what lovely games come from the Wadjet Eye factory in the future, but all I know is they are sure to be quality. :p

What makes you think Vista does not run properly on a computer with 1GB of ram? All you have to do is install a clean, bloatware free version of Vista, download the updates (SP1 etc, should do it automatically) remove some unessential services, turn aero off, and Vista runs fine.

UAC is annoying yes, but it can be turned off if you know what you are doing. I can't wait for 7 though, with it's improved UAC, which you can set to only prompt you when a program tries to access your precious data.

As for backward compatibility, everything should run okay, as long as you set it to run in backward compatiblity mode.

I have no issues running AGS, Photoshop, Max, and my machine (with it's glorious cracked lcd) only gets bogged down by that memory hog known as Firefox (seems to get veeeery hungry when left in sleep mode). Since you are buying a cheapish laptop, I'm assuming correctly you won't be trying to play Far Cry 2, so gaming performance is a non issue (and that is mostly up to your graphics card and ram).

Check here for Vista SP1 vs XP SP3... you will be suprised.
http://futuremark.yougamers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=72298

I could never go back to xp unless it gave me the wonderful search bar in the start menu... oh and the fact it looks like fisher-price designed the GUI.

Yes I like Vista, apart from the UAC which is far too overprotective, that said, better safe than sorry.

As for the Laptop, you should really concentrate on getting the fastest processor and a dedicated gfx card. Ram is not so important as you can always buy extra ram sticks (ask about limits, this laptop I'm using has 1gb upgradeable to 2, some have 2 upgradable to 4, etc) You would be better off getting dedicated graphics over integrated, as you cannot replace it. Same with a hard drive. But not too small. You want something workable. 160gb would probably be a minimum if you are working with programs like photoshop. But then again, you can always use an external.

I am getting a new laptop soon as well. I hear the Toshiba's are good, but I'm not too impressed with the keyboards. The keys are glossy and feel unusual to the touch. I like the design of the HP's, sexier than a mac, heat issues seem to be getting better, and I've found one with the specs I want/need. Sony are overpriced, macs are overpriced (you can run xp/vista/etc on them now... Just goes to show mac users want to be pc users, they just won't admit it). I hear the Dell studios are pretty good. 2GB Core 2 Duo/2gb ram/160hdd/256mb atiHD3450/15.4 wxga 1280x800 for £469 inc vat and shipping. Not sure what the euro price is sorry. I would probably recommend going for something like this for that money or pay a bit more and get the one with more ram, more hd and better processor.

Bah! Using a photo texture is cheating. I may as well use my stock 2d lamp-post photo, copy and paste a few times and adjust the lighting and highlights. Bob's your Fannies Uncle.

Depending on the technique used, 2d and 3d scenes can take a similar amount of time. Esp with photoshops vanishing point thingmabob and layers. 2d artists don't have to draw what the camera can't see, where as 3d, the camera can see every angle.

Even Sam and Max, which primarily uses a fixed point camera which only really dolly's left and right with the occasional pan. Cutscenes you can see the background.

I have no idea what my point is other than to agree with you that they aren't comparable.

2d can be crap or it can be sexy.
3d can be crap ot it can be sexy.

Due to the Activision/Blizzard merger, they had to find a new publisher (apparantly), and I think Codemasters are now publishing it. But yes, it was due to be released last year, and still yet to be seen.

It is not comparable. 3D has it's own ups and they seem to be huge pretty often.
For another example, 3D levels. You can draw few days a high-res background and decide that no, that tree or house won't go there and light is all wrong.

In 3D, you simply move house to new location and change light.
In 2D, you hang yourself from mouse cable.

I can't tell you how much I disagree with that statement.

Firstly, you would plan your location properly. Make sure your composition is right.

It would be about 10 minutes work to move a tree in 2D.

And about 8 of it would be deciding where to move it to.

But yes, 3D assets are great since you don't have to redraw that lamp-post 18 times, you just import your pre-made lamp-post model. But the time to model, unwrap, texture, normal map and spec map and whatever other maps your engine uses, you would spend a looooot more time on that lamp-post than you would if you had to draw that lamp-post 38 times.

I've seen some very artistic 3d models. Not necessary from games, as unfortunatly most commercial games ARE about how many minute details can I fit into this SUPER BUFF SOLDIERS armour, regardless of how impracticle it may be for Gorthor to be wearing decorative armour with sharp bits that have the potential to dig into ones skin, or shoulder pads with 13 spikey spiraled appendages which would poke your eyes out if you looked left. But returning to my original point, I've seen 3d that looks like an illustration due to very artistic texturing. Never see a realistic human character since no-one can pass the uncanny valley.

Back on track, 2D games are being made and released every day. Just go to any casual game portal and look at the screenshots. Very rare for a casual game to use 3d graphics, as the audience, according to our friend Dave, does not like 3D graphics and associate such as 'gamer' games... Which they do not play. Or want to be associated with. And unlike gamers, the casual audience are pretty choosy. They get a great variety of games, they get to try said games for 1 hour.

So no, 2d games are not dead.

'nuff said.

Yeah, I know where Portugal is. I was just pointing out that it is summer somewhere in the world.

I like the idea that LSL: Box office Bust will be a sandbox game. They even have hired a writer. Like I mean a Proper writer... well sort of... So hopefully it will be funny.

I think adventure games would work as sandbox games, as there is a lot of potential for a more fluid and less linear puzzle system, although I guess a mission based structure could remove some of the exploratory adventureness.

As I haven't read the whole thread I'm not really sure how relevant my post is, but hey!

It's summer down under matti. Never forget the Southern Hemisphere.

On topic... I never actually visited the site to be honest. I was making funnies about the fact people who have real and not so real problems ask people in internet forums who they don't know for advice.

Or maybe they just like drawing attention to themselves...


Woo-hoo... I'm over here!!

Listen to me!!!

I'm important too!!!

I made Dickboy! Hooray for the p3n1sh gmyae!

I'd much rather post all my problems on this forum and get the guys here to answer them... Rather than some bloke pretending to be an orc.