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I'm back as well, said a much less memorable person.

Play through as meeee (as soon as I play myself and figure out who I am exactly)

It wasn't live but it's not based on a photograph either, that's just what she looks like. I'll have to ask her before I post an actual photo of her here. I need to play around more with a way of doing hair that meshes better with the simplicity of the face, but without being a plastic helmet. [Edit: It's also really more of a preliminary, I can't call this a proper finished portrait.]

Alan, I appreciate frankness and honesty and I agree the hair needs work but "bad" and "atrocious" are hardly constructive criticisms, if you want to spout bile go find one of Icey's threads.

You know when I read the title, I was going to post in whatever the thread was for a joke, to say "That sounds like a sequel to How They Found Silence" 

I'm thrilled to see you're making this and I wish you the best of luck. I just happened to chance upon the first game a few weeks ago, and I really enjoyed it.

[Kaiji]

Kaiji

Gambling Apocalypse Kaiji! I love this show. Kaiji is thrust into impossible debt, several million yen, after cosigning a loan for an acquaintance. Rather than taking 11 years suffering under the burden of repayments, he accepts an invitation to an illegal gambling event where he can gamble against other people in his predicament. The real draw of this show is the impossible odds stacked against Kaiji... and how he reaches inside the mechanics of the rigged games he's embroiled in, the cheaters and traitors... and manipulates them to his advantage. Oh and I think he cries in every episode. It's a lot like Liar's Game if you're familiar with that. Look on TokyoToshokan for a torrent. Season 1 was subbed by The-Triad and season 2 is being subbed quickest by Nutbladder.

Planetes

Planetes is the story of people who collect debris orbiting Earth, in a near-future setting where space garbage has become a problem.. The animation in this show is really beautiful, as is the music. It's all about the character development with this show, and they're beautifully defined and developed. This is the only show that makes me cry even on repeat viewings, though it's not all dramatic, there are some amazing, real-life peril action scenes too. I can't recommend this enough. This has been dubbed and released on DVD in English speaking regions but I'd only recommend that if they have dual-audio and subtitles (I've never been fond of the voices they use in English dubs).

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

(There's another anime series just called Fullmetal Alchemist, but this is the second version which sticks to the manga more closely).
This is more of an action story, but there's a lot to enjoy. The animation is beyond beautiful and the music is wonderful. FMA is the story of two brothers who attempt to resurrect their mother using the power of alchemy by performing human transmutation, which is forbidden. However, alchemy follows the law of equivalent exchange, and in exchange for what the boys create, the elder brother loses a leg and the younger loses his entire body. The elder brother manages, after seeing "the truth", to sacrifice his arm in order to bind his brother's soul to a suit of armour. And from there they begin their journey, to regain what they have lost.

I sometimes get a Facebook suggestion to add as a friend an old employer of mine. Let me make it clear that there is no link on my Facebook to this whatsoever. I don't have it listed in my employment experience, I'm not currently friends with anyone who worked for him, we have no mutual friends.

But Facebook knows I did some cash-in-hand data entry for him two years ago.

(Fullsize)
I tried to keep it fairly simple, not many lines or shades. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. It's very sketchy obviously but I'm not sure if I could refine the detail into something more realistic without losing the simplistic charm. If I were doing it again I'd do the hair differently I think. All comments are welcome. The subject was quite pleased with it but I'd appreciate some outside feedback.

I think it's a fairly common misconception that there are "hackers" out there watching your every move, just waiting for you to slip up so they can intercept your insecure transmissions.

I'm impressed that you guys are reporting success in streaming video via a proxy, I've never been able to do that at a watchable pace (trying to access Hulu from the UK...).

Awesome, very well done.

On a side note, that music playing in the train cab, what is that? How do you obtain it? Because it's what I think of when I want to do... well, scenes like that, but I don't know what it's called  

Edit: Also was the opening inspired in any way by Look Around You?

I didn't even realise this thread had been bumped out of the bowels of hell, but since it already has been I'll post with impunity. I just played this game and I thought it was pretty neat. The art style has a particular charm for some reason, even though it is quite simple. And there were several parts I actually did find a little creepy.

Actually, graphically it reminds me of Pleurghberg, which is no bad thing.

http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/a-javascript-3d-model-viewer-in-your-browser-20110129/

This seems pretty cool, and it works out of the box. I only found it on a cursory google which I imagine you did yourself but maybe my search terms were slightly different.

I can tell you what I DON'T like is rehashes of things I've seen before, and games where your inventory items look awwwwfully familiar. I think a good example of this (and I loved the game otherwise) is the pipe-centric puzzles in Gemini Rue. You have to do a lot of stuff with pipes. Then later on... oh, another pipe. So in terms of advice for the future, puzzles that are fresh within the game itself.

That said, I love puzzles which recall a previous puzzle in an interesting way, like the Year 4 packing foam stuff in Grim Fandango, or building the makeshift voodoo doll at the end of Monkey Island II.

I made the shading a lot more bold, for instance the shadow under the chin. After that I replaced the eyes with the shadows you see now, because at this resolution I don't think you'd really see the whites all too clearly. I then took my new darker shade from the neck and reshaded most of the face, in line with how I'd changed the neck. I also changed her shirt but the lighting I went for is really weird and unrealistic, her head should cast more of a shadow. But in general a little pool of light on a torso usually looks pretty good. I went for standard cartoon horizonal hair-highlights to make her hair stand out (two extra light shades) and I added a darker shade to give it some depth. Hope this gives you some ideas. She looks a bit older than 19 in my edit, which I think could be helped by removing some of my shading and detailing, but there's probably a happy medium.

A guy on my course at uni has an original iPad and I often see him drawing with it during lectures. It looks like he manages pretty well. He mostly just does sketches and manga-style stuff, but certainly from the distance I'm viewing it, it seems as if he gets in a fair amount of precision and detail.

Of course I don't look for long because I can also always see the smears and grease on the screen. They've taken on an almost embossed appearance and an increasingly white, mould-like hue. Urghh.

Just a quick and dirty paintover to show off some ideas.

In the first image I just played around with the values a bit. I made the scene a lot brighter than made it "dark" again by desaturating it. I feel that this makes it look pretty nighttimey without sacrificing as much visibility. That said, giving everything a blue or purple tint would also be good for that.

In the middle image I made everything pretty much black except for where the lightning was flashing. The lightning should probably light up a way bigger area on the floor, and illuminate part of the wall too. The way it is now, the light source looks pretty close.

In the third one I just did some pixeling around the candle to suggest how you could make the light from the candle feel warmer and make the room seem illuminated by it.

like Bush said....you are either with us or against us.

Huh. If you're not an apple, you're a banana.

Unless he's planning a Coke Classic style return I'd say this is pretty conclusive (BBC News).

I haven't even thought about implementing in AGS yet, but you raise a good point. I'll probably end up making a new back-end dialogue system just to help along the kind of dialogues I want to write, that are more like graphs than trees.

The "No" campaign is the most persuasive argument for voting Yes.

My gf's got her periods

Would you rather she hadn't?