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I redrew and animated the side and back views. I'm very happy with the side view animation and I think the back view is good but I think the head looks wrong. I also did a quick "push" animation and "gun shot" animation.

I think I will use character portraits to solve the lack of character/style problem.

ProgZman: While your edit looks great and I could do something similar if I wanted, the point of making the characters look the way they do is to make it easy to use the basic design to create many characters with ease. While doing it this way I have to make sacrifices like the ability to make each character an individual, it saves me a lot of time and energy.
Jakerpot: The man and woman that I original animated are test characters that have nothing to do with the game. I made them before I had a plot or any ideas for a game just to get the design and animation down. Now that I animated the main character and am planning on completely redrawing and reanimation the side and back views you can ignore those characters.

I’ve been dabbling with the background.


First I have removed the gray squares and made that part of the wall look more realistic. Second I added some noise to the background to make it look grittier. And last I have three ideas for changing the floor tiles. The first (top left) removes many of the actual tiles but still gives the impression that the floor is tiled and makes it look less uniform. The second option (top right) is similar to the first but with a more minimal approach. The last option (bottom) solves the problem of telling were the doors are and is the one I’m leaning towards. The only problem with this one is that it makes the side doors look as if their being viewed from a top down perspective while the rest of the background is at an angle.

I’ve also tweaked the main characters front view animation.

rbaleksandar: its suppose to be light from the window. I will probably remove them from the doors because it doesn't make sense where the light is coming from, unless there is a light bulb in every doorway.

I will look into reworking the background to make it look less angular and more organic and natural like some of my old stuff. I would like it to be made up of tiles without it looking so obvious.

I've touched up the main character and reworked the facedown animation.



I don't want these characters to look too much like unoriginal Japanese RPG sprites. It will be hard to completely remove the similarities but I will try. First off the game will be set in the future but have a 19th century atmosphere. I will also add some fantasy elements (giants, vampires, shape shifters) but try to not use the kind seen in almost every game (goblins, trolls, and elves).

Yes, I know this style was used in console RPGs. I have played video games in the past : . I made the characters eyes much smaller and gave them more realistic hair to differentiate them from Japanese, manga styled characters like in Chrono Trigger or Dragon Warrior.

spacePaw: I'm not exactly sure what you mean but I think you are saying that I should make the gray squares look more natural, thinner, and less blocky, to get them to look more like the top of the wall and less like "blocks". I tried that at first but I kind of like this better. The more natural looking walls looked to plain and uninteresting. The gray squares, in my opinion, make it look less real but it gives it more of a puzzle, "game" feel, if that makes sense.

I have been trying to come up with an art style that makes it easy to create lots of backgrounds and characters in a short time. I think I’ve got it pretty much down but I need some help.



this is a animation test with a male and female character. I like the male characters face down animation but his other animations need some work. I am pretty happy with all the female animations. The static character in the middle is my idea for a main character.



this is a background that I am working on. any changes or advise you can come up with would be appreciated.

matti: that worked perfectly! thank you very much.

I have a room with a bathroom connected to it and the two rooms are separated by a door. The door is an object in the room and in the interact with object area I put this code:

if (character[0].y > 131) { // character is standing in walkable area 1
      character[0].Walk(127,131,eBlock); //walk to door from walkable area 1
}
else {
      character[0].Walk(127,92,eBlock); //walk to door from walkable area 2
}

if (GetGlobalInt(28) == 0) { // if the Globalint is 0 (the default)
    // open door:
      SetObjectView(3,2); // open door view
    SetGlobalInt(28, 1); // set GlobalInt to 1 so the door will be closed on next interaction
  }
  else { // if GlobalInt is not 0, i.e. 1
    // close door:
      SetObjectView(3, 3); // closed door view
      SetGlobalInt(28, 0); // reset GlobalInt to 0 so door will be openend next time
  }

this works very well except I can't get it so when your in the main room (walkable area 1) AND the door is closed it removes walkable area 2 and vise versa but when the door is open both walkable areas are restored. And I'm not very knowledgeable with coding. what I have now is mainly trial and error and help from the forums so be as specific as you can.

I am having a very hard time creating backgrounds of rooms look like my outdoors backgrounds. I put the two together so you can better compare.

One of my big problems is that I'm not very good at drawing buildings. My outdoors backgrounds have many layers and have no strait lines and were very easy to make. I would just draw some organic looking shape and turn it into a tree or a bush or something in seconds but buildings are all about strait lines and are closed in by walls so there are a limit to how many layers I can have. It took me no more than an hour to finish the outdoors background but it’s taken me months just to draw the beginning of a room that I’m at all happy with. If anyone could give me some pointers it would be much appreciated.

Ok, so I have a new background that I'm having some trouble with.


I like the background but I want to add a lighting effect where it looks like rays of light are shining through the leaves and lighting up the ground in patches. I’ve also decided that the game will be in the fall later in the game but start out in the summer.

Snake - thats actually exactly what I was thinking of doing. I have an idea for another background that shows the inside of a shop and it is framed like your looking at it through a key hole.

My computer has been broken for about a week and a half so I'm just getting back to working on this game. I'm trying to get a background style worked out and I have changed it a bit from my first background I posted.


I drew it first with green bushes but I forgot that I want the game to take place in the fall so I did a quick paint over but I don't like the paint over nearly as much as the first one. I threw some characters in so you can get a feel for what it will look like in play. Also I didn't add any noise to the grass or bushes yet like I did with the first background I'm not sure if it really needs it.

I have some more characters and while I didn't notice a problem with having only two frames with the first character I can definitely tell that these characters could benefit from having a few more frames. I might just make all the characters with two frame animations and make some quickly done backgrounds, like the one I posted, just to flesh out the game and go threw when I'm done and add more animations and maybe spend some more time with the backgrounds. So I guess I'm more interested in what you think of the characters than the animations unless you think I should keep the two frame animations than I would like to hear your opinion otherwise I will probably add more frames in the future.

The first character is a half man half snake boy with a mask on and the other is a pregnant lady that was originally ugly but became less and less ugly as I worked on her. They will be key characters in this game.

I knew that you couldn't post in JPEG but I posted that really quickly and forgot to change it to PNG. I know that I could make it look better with more frames but it’s the animation process that usually causes me to give up on games. I spend too much time on them and try to hard to get them perfect that I get frustrated and quit so I'm trying to keep it simple and do animations with very few frames. I think its because if you are making an animation with lots of frames your trying to make it look realistic and as good as possible and being a perfectionist makes it very difficult to be satisfied with any of them but if you use a small number of frames the goal is to make it look believable and that is something I can achieve and be satisfied with.

I made the stars look more like they were in constellations and removed a lot of them. I also changed the sky a bit to make it look less flat. Dos anyone think that there are too many rocks?

Im not very good at backgrounds but here is one that I started. What do you think?

I drew some character animations for a game I might make. The game would be called Dead Silence. I just thought of it not to long ago so its still in a very rough draft stage. The main idea is that the main character is a writer who has had a case of writers block for a while. He overhears some men talking about some elaborate illegal endeavor and uses the idea in his next book. The men find out and as punishment cut out his tongue. He looses consciousness and when he wakes up he is in the land of the dead. Turns out he’s not entirely dead yet and someone just made a mistake but he’s having trouble convincing anyone because he can’t talk do to not having a tongue. That’s all I got for now and things might change but what I know for sure is that the main character will have his tongue cut out and be involved with the dead somehow. Also I would like to have a talking severed head that he caries around with him for some reason.


The thing in his hand is a stick and he's suppose to be wearing a cotton gray sweater over a white button down shirt and tie but it looks like a trench coat. I'm not to happy with the walk animation but it’s the best I could do. And the bottom left animation was originally going to be a blink animation but it looks more like he’s casting a spell or something but it looked cool so I kept it.

I don't know if I will ever put these in a game but I thought they were cool looking. They are futuristic floating legless guys with various weapons attached to them.

Far left one: This is the one that the other two are made from. He was the original and if you cant tell he is smoking a cigarette.

The middle one: The thing sticking out of his arm is suppose to be a chain saw but it doesn't really look like one. The thing on his other arm is a claw.

The Right one: I had the most trouble with what to do with this one but it kind of turned out to be the coolest one. He has a huge shoulder pad and a ball and chain for a hand. He has nothing for his other hand because I couldn't think of what to put there. I first thought of a hammer but it didn't look good. Any suggestions on what do with his empty arm would be appreciated. Oh and he has a Mohawk.

SerioCornaga: Well you get what I meant and that's all that matters. I wont put any blood or violence in the game just because. I hate it when game makers turn out these games filled with violence just because violence is "cool" and forget about the story or any kind of character development. To know what a good use of violence in games is, check out God of War (one word Awesometastic.)

Anyway here are the characters in a background. I'm still not sure about the outlines.

Enlarged to show detail - Captain Crunch 2006

I just started a test game to see if the characters look good with the background and I noticed that they kind of blend into the background. I wanted them to stand out so I tried making them slightly different colors then making them darker and lighter and then I thought of putting black outlines around them. Know usually when I see this look in a game I hate it. It usually looks cheaply made and just throne together but it really made the characters stand out.

This is going to be a serious game with blood and violence and such so I wanted the characters to mach the feel of the game but my characters always end up looking cartoony. But then I started to think that I have really never seen this look in a serious game before and it would be really different and in my opinion the most important thing in making a game is to have something new and different. Whew that's a lot of typing. So tell me what you think.

I'm using GraphicsGale.
And that's not a shield (even thought it does look like it) it's an apron type thing.
I've had Fallout and Fallout 2 for a long time but it took me forever to beat Fallout because of all the bugs and I have just got to the end of Fallout 2. I can't wait until Bethesda finally releases new info about Fallout 3. I have always loved apocalyptic type games but there aren't many out there (another one I like a lot is Shadowrun for SNES) and I have always wandered why there weren't more of them. When I graduate from my local community college I hope to go on to Full Sail in Florida and get a degree in game art and design. Then I will be able to make all the cool games that no one else is making (Act raiser 3, Punch out 3, sequel to beneath the steal sky, ect.)

There suppose to be. It's a low-res game.