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Two things:

1) I don't like photos in AGS games. Not at all.
2) Your hand drawn backgrounds look cool! Of course they take longer, but they are original and personal.

The "Raiders of the Lost Ark" thread shows some great examples of how you base your backgrounds on photos and still come up with a believable Fate Of Atlantis style. I really like that.
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=42327.0

Thanks for the comment and the link. I am going to check that out. 
My bigges problem is my motivation that starts to vanish very fast as soon as the work gets too much. And thats pretty much my problem - I love being able to explore in adventure games, and exploration means that I have to use a few more backgrounds than other adventures. And drawing every single background is already too much work to maintain my motivation. /:

I have been planning an adventure game for so long now, yet I can`t really make proper decisions. My earlier projects teached me to set myself relatively little goals and better not think too big or too long about my projects.
However, right now I thought about using photos as backgrounds for my game. They are fast to make, but I wonder if they wouldn`t appear a little cheap - especially since I am going for a more cartoony style for the characters. Setting-wise, my games go in a very similiar direction as Kings Quest, with many fairytalish forests and fantasy landscapes to explore.

My earlier projects (around 2008) looked like this and had a huge amount of cartoon-styled animations:


My main character is a cat with a hat (the one Graham from KQ wears) and still looks like this:

(The furry thing at the bottom is a reference to that horrible horrible internet fandom that likes erotic pictures of animal cartoon characters. My character here pretty much carries two chainguns on his arms, ready to blast the one who calls him a furry - in case you don`t get it )

But, even if those backgrounds look simple, together with the animations they took by far the longest time at this ambitious project. With photos, this process would be unnecessary and the whole game making process would speed up. And as I already said, the problem with the clashing styles will appear.

So, just for trying it out, I made this little experiment using that (actually not very pretty ) sketch from the page above:
http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/3271/pic2jb.png

And I don`t really know what to think of that (aside from noticing that the character needs some shadow at his feet). I actually kinda like how the character in all its black and white glory contrasts with the surrounding. I think it almost has some kind of charme to it. If I animate him nicely and let the scenery cast shadows on him at the right places, it would look kinda nice.

It would be very awesome if you guys here could give me some advice on this.  
Or, do you know any other games where something similiar was pulled off right?

I looked into every room with the debug mode and I was really impressed with some of the new backgrounds, especially the Dragon Mountain looked breathtaking. Its also great how you used backgrounds form Qfg 4 1/2  
Also, seeing your speech animation with such a high frame rate felt like watching a webcam video inside the game, very well done.  

But to be honest, I would like this a lot more if you just made a new QFG game that takes place in Spielburg once again, but with new problems, characters, missions and all kinds of changes that happened during the years of absence.  

This alreadly looks like a game I would love! Even if the graphics look simple, they give me such a wonderful Kings Quest-feel.
I WANT TO PLAY IT!

Are there other locations to explore besides the castle?

Don't give him yellow skin, please!

Why? There isn't much that you can do. The PC version of AGI uses the standard EGA palette, so choices are limited, unless you're more happy with gay pink (or... use dithering with such wide pixels which just make the character look as if he gets... pox):

As far as I can remember there is a relatively dark red colour in the palette that was always used for skin. Why not use that?

I really like the character and the colours you used so far by the way. Even if the pixels are huge, its pleasant to look at.

Wow, doing such a project must be a HUGE undertaking. Monkey Island 3 is by far my favorite game of the series (especially because of the wonderful graphics), but I would still love to play this game.

However, I have one criticism:
The background style doesn`t really looke like MI1 or MI2. I would like it if you would leave out the Anti Aliasing and use pixels and dithering to get a look that reminds me more of MI1. 

Also, I think it would be a good idea to first finish the entire game by using placeholder graphics. This way, you have the "skeleton" of your game finished and you would "only" have to add the graphics. If you show that to people, they will see that there is a progress and that the game will most likely be finished someday. Also, I believe that many people (and me ) would then like to help you with drawing sprites and backgrounds.

I actually like the idea of making two movies at the same time with the same set and actors. If done right, such movies could actually be very interesting to watch - you could see two variations of the same story which go into a totally different direction as the movie progress.

But this, however, is just horrible.  :o

Was there any place where I could have seen the theme earlier? Looks like I have to take part in the next hoursoung competition. 

Where can I see the theme? 

I like the colors a lot better now, but somehow I think that the style in which the sand is drawn in the first picture gives it a lot more depth.

Quite some years ago, when I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, I was in a hospital and there was some videogame freak with me in one room. We often talked about videogames in general and by accident I remembered yesterday that he told me about a weird videogame that he loved and I never heard of. As far as I remember, the way he described the gameplay reminded me of adventure games.

It was a series of games, named after the main character, whose name I have forgotten.

The first game was about an island you had to travel to, but I forgot why. He told me that these games had a lot of freedom, and you could interact with almost everyone and everything and you also had to catch your train at the right time or else the game would take a different direction. Sadly, I can`t remember more oft this.

Another other game of the series was called "[insert name of main character here] and the chocolate bar". This time you were trapped in some kind of weird parallel dimension that you have to escape. You were walking around in a strange, warped version of the main characters home town. People were flying across the sky, children were eating raw potatoes on a stick instead of ice cream, animals in restaurants were eaten alive and so on. There also was a barber, and if you looked trough the window, you could see that when the people combed their hair, it turned in the opposed direction than it should be (I hope you know what I mean, basically you move your comb the the left, but the hair moves to the right). That videogame freak also told me that the chocolate bar in the title would play an important role at the end of the game.

And the last thing I remember was that in another game of the series, the main character walked around almost naked all the time.  

Have you guys ever heard or seen such a game series or did that guy just a prank on me?  

To me, there is absolutely no problem with the face. It looks just the way I would imagine it looking from the front. 
Also, I liked that huge chin in the previous pictures. Why did you remove it?

It would be great if you guys here could give me some opinions about my art. I posted most of it on DeviantArt, but there I get little to none criticism - mainly because I draw my own stuff instead of fan-arts about popular franchises that get a lot of attention.  
I plan to create an adventure game with my art style once I have enough time and ideas for it.

Most of my pictures are created without any big thought process behind them - I just draw what I feel like at the moment. So, describing what could be going on there would be kinda pointless.  


This viking was originally supposed to appear on the picture below, instead of the woman.




"Määh" is the german word for "baa".  






As you can see, this could be the bad guy. He fits to every cliche of a villain.  8)


I also tried to draw sprites in my style. I am satisfied with this walking animation, even if the arm looks a bit flat and the hand changes size if you look closely.


However, I also like to draw more cartoony, like in this picture. I cam up with the little shy creature standing in that winter forest there while I was drawing the picture. I also have a new version of that character that I want to have as some kind of main character for a game.
And yes, MSPaintR0cks is my name on DeviantArt.  

To me, it depends on how interested I am into the world of the game. My favorite games (Kings Quest series and Quest for Glory series) had a lot of hotspot in every location and I really enjoyed interacting with everything to get more informations about the world of the game. 

I tried something some minutes ago:
I replaced a piece of music from the videogame DOOM with a midi of my own. I started the game in DOSBox and what I heard was my midi, but played back with the Adlib Synthesizer. And it sounded EXACTLY the way I wanted it. 
Minutes later I discovered this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwgSmXkIQf8
In that video, midis were converted to adlib tunes with a media player that could be run inside DOSBox.
This way I could create adlib tunes out of midi files.
But then again, I would have to export them as MP3, which sucks. 

@Calin Leafshade
Actually, that is one of my problems - I don`t like the idea of having huge MP3 files of recorded sound blaster music. It would be great if there was a way to convert midis into sound blaster tunes AND have them played back via soundcard just like midis.

@Scavenger
And sadly, I have no idea how composing Adlib tunes works. 
If you ever try again to get such a plugin to work, DO IT. 

I am a huge fan of the sound blaster music that was used in videogames in the early nineties (mainly because of nostalgia  ), and because of that I would love to compose the music for my games in exactly that format. But to be honest, I have no idea how something like this could be done.  

The sound blaster I am talking about sounds like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygvltlx4F7A

Would a plugin for AGS be possible that emulates the sound of that old synthesizer instead of Midi instruments, just like the way DOSBox does it? Or are there already similiar plugins to this?
Or do you guys have any other ideas how to get that sound? I already looked for soundfonts, but without success. Also, in case of using soundfonts I would have to create big WAV or MP3 files, which I don`t want.

Morshu is the name of the shopkeeper in those old, ridicoulos Zelda CD-I games. I always liked this character and rewrote his name to "MMMorshew" randomly. I put the three Ms at the beginning of the name because of the way he emphasizes the "Mmmh..." after he told Link that he can`t give credit.

You can watch his cutscene here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8XxuW-Orww

I remember a very disturbing puzzle that appeared in an old Maniac Mansion Mania episode. You had to cut off the ear of a dog with a knife, fill it with dust out of an airvent and then give it to a hungry guy guarding a door, so that he would let you pass. 

Sorry for not logging in for so long. I won`t be able to look on the internet regulary for the next time, so hosting and watching a contest would be very hard. If Le Woltaire or another member wants to create a new contest, just do it. 

Maybe it has already been said, but what always makes me feel nervous is the moment when you realize that the horror you go trough wasn`t created or thought of by a human being or a human mind (I dont`t mean the author of the game with that, but rather the `something` inside the game that is responsible for the hero`s situation).
On the other side, at the end of a creepy horror game I always need a relaxing, good ending where the hero has finally survived the dangers and lives happily ever after. Maybe not that cheesy, but you get the idea. I don`t like dark and twisted endings, I am a bit too sensitive in those things.