Messages

Just wanted to congratulate you on finishing your game.   I haven't played it yet, but just finishing a game at all is an accomplishment, and since no one has congratulated you yet, I thought I'd better do it.

By the way, when is the sequel coming out?

I personally prefer the first image, especially because of its wonky perspective and sketchy black outlines.  I think it has a lot of style and individuality.

However, my opinions are usually in the minority

I think most players would prefer the second, because the lack of black outlines is more soothing to the eye, the colors are more subtle, and the perspective is better (while still being a little wonky, which I would still argue is a good thing).

In other words it's more realistic, which most non-artists instantly equate with "quality."



By the way, both pictures demonstrate some decent artistic talent, and the fact that you are able to work in more than one style is also encouraging.  Now, just stick around long enough to finish your game, and we'll all be impressed

I think you should add some lines to the columns in the same gray as the dollar signs.  It would add a touch of class.  Also, the graffiti could be a little more elaborate, maybe spelling a funny slogan, or just being larger in general.

Good start, though.  Very stylish.

Next: Aliens abducting illegal aliens.

Because of my high maturity level, I have created a panda with a large gun.



2x



I call him Panda of Fortune.
He uses all 9 colors.

Good luck, everyone else!

The metal spiral part of a notebook?  Brilliant.

Here's a few more:
Darkness
Fog
Earthquake in a can (I think this was in a Road Runner cartoon once)

I think making it in 3D first sounds easiest.  You could also try googling pictures of corridors, and see if you can find one that has the exact curve you're looking for (regardless of what's actually in the corridor).  Then, use it as reference when drawing your own, or place it on a separate layer and trace over it.  There's no shame in tracing, since the end result will probably look nothing like the starting picture anyway.

By the way, I think a curving corridor is a better idea for a spaceship interior than the room you had before.  Good luck, and remember: patience is the artist's greatest tool.

Not sure how the thought inventory would work, but it is a cool idea.  Like, you could give Love to a princess or Loyalty to a king or Eternal Disdain to your sarcastic sidekick.

What would a pen cap actually be useful for?  Hmm... I guess you could store very small amounts of a liquid in it.  Like... a mermaid's tear as an ingredient for a potion.  Though why pens and mermaids would exist in the same world is beyond me.

The silicone implant is a great idea.  You could use the shrinkray I mentioned earlier in reverse to make it into a beanbag chair. 


As for my addition to the list, I think it's already been said, but:
-intestines.

It's actually part of this idea for a game I had: You're a zombie, and the only inventory items you use in the game are parts of your own body.  Like, your intestines would function as a rope to cross pits, or a whip to defeat enemies.  You could pull off one arm and hold it in the other to grab things that are just out of reach (and too slippery to lasso with your intestines).   You could detach your eyeball and stick it in holes to see things you couldn't otherwise see.   And you would use your teeth to bite people, obviously.  Also, eating brains would give you "super strength" that you could use to smash through locked doors, etc.

And you could talk to any object in the game, but everytime you press the talk cursor, you would just shout variations of "GRAAA!" or "Splargh!" or something totally random.

Thanks for chipping in, everyone!

I adjusted the bottoms of the buildings so that the lines weren't so rigidly horizontal.  I personally think this really made a difference.

As per cobra's suggestion, I lowered the windows so they look like they're on the first floor instead of the, uh...  first and a half floor (thanks for catching that!).  I also followed his suggestion for the tree trunks -amazing what a few pixels will do.  Finally, I tried some atmospheric perspective near the horizon line.

Then ProgZmax showed up and blew my freaking mind.

First of all, the mountains.  I was racking my brains trying to think of what to put in that empty space, and suddenly, there it is.  Perfect.
Then we have the clouds, which completely put my dinky little pillow-shaped thing to shame.  They also inspired me to improve.  (I've kept the dinky cloud in for now, mostly because I'm too tired to erase it).
And lastly, the shading on the roof, which impressed me the most because it's basically exactly what I wanted to do but couldn't.  It's like you reached into my head and pulled out my background.  Kudos.

I also appreciate you taking the time to tweak my player character.  The finished product is impressive, and I might just use it as reference if I ever make a sequel.  However, for this first game I'm going for the old-old school of character design, like back when everyone had orange skin and one-pixel noses.  I notice most people making AGS games nowadays have moved beyond that style, but I haven't yet.  You just can't fight the nostalgia.  Oh, I did recolor two pixels because of your design, though.  So it's not a total loss.

Here's my design in all its current glory:



As you can see, I also adjusted the side wall and window of the pink building.  If anything, it's even more confusing now, but I like it better, and that's what counts.  I could always use it as a joke for a Look command: "The architecture is so bad, it's actually breaking the physical laws of the universe!" or something to that effect.

And finally, just a spur of the moment thing, I added some people talking on the other side of the window on the right.  (Oh, and cobra79, this building looks different because it's actually a bar.  Why is a bar right next to a suburban house?  Well, I only have so many rooms to stick all the locations in.  Which is why the circus tent is going to be right next to the strip club, but that's another story).

I don't think you should make the blood transparent, but maybe it should fade more at the edges.  Blood tends to soak into/stain anything it's on, meaning it would get flatter the more it dries (think of it as a discoloration of the floor, rather than a liquid on the floor).  It should also contrast less with the background.  Blood starts to look dark and brown as it dries.

Unless you want the blood to look really fresh, in which case ignore what I just said and make the blood look gooey, and have it reflect the lights.

As for the floor, I mentioned tinting briefly in my last post, but I'll go into more detail now (sorry if you know all of this already).  The basic idea is that nothing in nature is pure gray.  Some man-made things (like spaceships) can be pure gray, but very rarely.  Most of the time, the gray has some other color mixed into it, like a little cool blue or warm yellow.  If you're just looking at it offhand, you'd think it was plain gray, but there is a very noticeable difference between, say, a greenish gray and a purple-gray, if you look at the two side-by-side.  What all this means is that you could have a completely gray room, as long as the walls, floor, and ceiling each had different colors mixed in with the gray (also, they would be darker/lighter than each other, as your picture already demonstrates).

The other thing is that all colors are affected by the color of the light that hits them, and the only time that the light is pure white is when things are lit by the sun at noon (which is why everything looks washed-out then).  At any other time, light either has a slight (almost unnoticeable) yellow or blue tint.  Of course, the scientists on your ship may have invented artificial lights that can simulate the noontime sun, so you can just ignore this part

If I'm remembering Star Wars correctly, the floor of the Death Star was just a dark, almost black slab that was very shiny, and reflected the wall lighting in all kinds of cool, wavy lines.

I think the floors in the original Star Trek were just flat and gray, and they did a good job of demonstrating my tinting example by appearing a little yellowish because of the wall lighting.  I could be wrong though.  I don't usually stare at the floors while watching Star Trek.

Ha!  I never thought of it like that.  It's supposed to be her lower lip.
Anyway, I'm glad you think the proportions are acceptable.

Any other observations?  Do you like the color scheme?  Do you mind that I obviously have no respect for proper perspective?  Do you think I should shut up and wait until more people have commented on the image?

Does this look infected to you?

MrColossal did a great job of telling you what's not in your picture, so I'll try to cover what is.

Good start, perspective-wise.  I would agree that the blood seems a little random.  I would suggest having more, and making sure it responds to gravity (drips) and inertia (blood covers walls in arcs when sprayed from arteries).  The alternative would be to go in the opposite direction, and have faint traces of blood here and there, barely visible.  This would set up that "Something's not quite right" mood, and you could save the real gore-fest image for later in the game, where it would have a bigger impact.
Oh, and the blood on the floor looked like to me like it was "hovering" at first, because its shadows are so low-contrast, and the texture of the floor is so strong.  It's actually a nice effect if the floor is meant to be highly reflective, like marble or something.  If it's not... well you might want to fix that.

Speaking of the floor, is it supposed to be bronze or something?  'Cause it looks brown.  Brown doesn't exactly scream "spaceship."  I know it's boring to have gray walls, floor and ceiling in spaceships, but you could maybe add a tint of color to it, like... ooh, ooh, how about colored lighting?  Nothing too obvious, maybe just a slight green cast or something.  Or, since something bad has happened on the ship, it stands to reason that the red "holy crap, panic!" security lights would be on.
As far as the suggestion of having some of the lights be out, you could explain that with phaser burns on the walls (and broken glass from the lights).  After all, people who leave that much blood on the walls are going to fight back against whatever is killing them.

On a pickier note, the value (darkness/lightness) of the floor seems very close to the value of the back wall, causing the two to "merge," flattening the image.  I'd recommend making one or the other lighter or darker, and possibly also drawing the bottom part of the back wall darker, to further distinguish between wall and floor.

The texture of the back wall works fine, I think, especially if it's going to be obscured by pipes, portholes, etc. as per MrCollossal's suggestions.  The texure doesn't work so well on the left, though.  I'd redo that.  And lastly, if you're gonna have pipes/seams, I'd recommend putting one right where the left wall and back wall meet.  Right now, the rigid 90 degree line kind of screams "You are looking at a game!" when it should be saying "This is a real place you are in right now, built and lived-in by real people."

Whew.  Sorry if that was too in-depth or wordy.  Which leads me to my last suggestion: moderation.  Like MrCollossal pointed out, you could clutter up your screen with all kinds of realistic crap, but it's better to choose only the things that express your important ideas: This is a spaceship.  People used to live/work/love here.  Most of those people are dead now, and you could be next.

A can koozie could be used to... fix a leaky pipe?
Also, the wet paper bag intrigues me... not sure why.

Anyway, I had a bunch of ideas all at once, so I'll just dump them in this post.

You mentioned an antigravity generator in your game (very cool idea, by the way), and someone way back in this thread mentioned suction boots.  The logical thing would be to combine the two: antigrav boots.
My original idea for using them was to get an unreachable item on the ceiling.  Then I realized that you could use them to make some really unique spatial puzzles.  Imagine an M.C. Escher drawing turned into a playable maze: walk up the wall, then jump to a platform, walk around the other side of the platform (going from upside-down to right-side up in the process) jump to another platform, etc.  You wouldn't have to script it like a platformer- the jumping would just be a canned animation triggered when you click on the right hotspot.  The tricky part would be drawing it so that the player could easily judge the distance between platforms, what was higher/lower, etc.

My next idea would be an inventory item that actually inconvenienced the player, rather than helping him.  I'm thinking specifically about a parasitic creature that latches onto the player.  He would appear stuck to the border of the inventory box, rather than in an item slot, and when the mouse cursor hovered over him, he would grab it, and not let go until you shook the mouse back and forth a bit.  Preferably, you would change the default pointer cursor to, say, a hand pointing.  That way, it would be immersive "It's got my arm!" rather than breaking the forth wall "I can't click on shit!"  I have no idea how you would script something like this, but I believe it's possible and I KNOW it's kickass

And lastly, just a throwaway idea that came to me out of the blue:
The game developer's mind could be an inventory item.  That way, you'd always be able to solve those nonsensical, "what was the designer thinking?" puzzles.
Alright, basically it's a cutesy version of a hint system, but I still think it would be funny if using it would get responses like "Duh, obviously all you have to do is use the jellyfish on the horse testical and the magnetron.  This is just common sense, people.  It's simple!"

I can't think of a specific example, but a bottlecap has to have been used before.  It just has to have been.

I think the "air in your lungs" item is especially clever, but it would probably make more sense as a gui option: "blow on."
I also like your idea of "silly" putty, because if there's one thing adventure games need more of, it's bad puns

For my next contribution, I'm just going to steal from Legacy of Kain: Soulreaver.
-What if you could carry, say, a portal to another realm around with you?
The other realm is like the current room, but objects are moved around, certain doors are unlocked/locked, and of course, everything just looks really warped and creepy.

This idea could also work for "vision" items, like:
Nightvision goggles
X-ray specs
Your cosmic-ray glasses.

You could also have "spiritual vision" items, i.e. you could see whether people were good or bad.  Good people look like angels, bad people look like demons.  It would be especially cool if you got this item late in the game, and you suddenly realized that a character that has been helping you for no apparent reason is actually an evil guy leading you into a trap (It's a trap! It's a trap!... sorry, my inner Admiral Ackbar took control there for a second).

KhrisMUC:
I honestly have no idea how I missed that.  Well, at least I'll know from now on.

monkey_05_06:
Thanks for commenting.  Even if you didn't have any specific suggestions, it's good to know that at least someone out there likes where my bkground is going so far.

By the way, what do you guys think of my player character?  Does she fit in with the environment well?
Also, the green thing on the right is supposed to be a garbage bin.  Is that clear?  I made it pretty cartoony, and I want to make sure it's still recognizable.

Sorry, I didn't realize that blurry pictures could make forum members scream like little girls.

It should be fixed now.  (I had to google an HTML tutorial to do it, but I'm flattered that you assumed I could use HTML fluently, even after I posted a blurry picture.)

As for your other comment, actually I started out trying to emulate the old Leisure Suit Larry games, but I got tired of the limited palette and all the 90 degree vertical lines, so I spiced it up with some crooked lines and flashy colors.  Interesting that everyone around here immediately thinks DOTT everytime they see a slanted door.

I think the problem with the picture is that it's caught in a limbo between "too crooked" and "not crooked enough."   Also, the straight horizontal lines of the bottom of the buildings are starting to bug me now.

Thanks for your criticism, though.  I'm glad I decided to post this before adding roof tiles and other textures.  I can see this is going to take some serious reworking (doesn't everything?).

Glad to be of service.  Here's another idea:

magic spell that can bring inanimate objects to life

This could create some very interesting puzzles:
Table too heavy to move? Use the spell, and it gallops away!
Can't figure out where to go? Use the spell on a map, and it will give you directions
(with a snooty accent and general attitude of disdain, of course)
Locked door? Use the spell on it and then convince it to unlock itself.

Damn, I'm not usually into fantasy games, but this is starting to sound pretty good.
I might have to make this game myself one day.

Until that day, feel free to use this idea in your own game.  See how many puzzles you can come up with that stem from this one item.

Okay, obviously this is unfinished (no shadows on the right side, etc.)

However, I thought I'd post what I had so that I could better implement suggestions, instead of geting it all nice and spiffy, and then having to redraw large portions of it later.
Oh, and I included my player character sprite so you could see if the proportions look good, etc.




Basically, I'm asking for three things:

1. Suggestions on how to "polish" up the image to give it that "finished" look.  Style tips and redraws would be especially appreciated.
2. I want to know whether you think the character sprite looks like it "belongs" in the game world.  Obviously I do, but I need outside opinions.
most importantly: 3. Would you play a game that had this type of background?

Thanks in advance to all who take the time to help me out.

My original name idea was Noobtube, but apparently, that's already a thing.

So, I just took the name of the hero of the Odyssey, and added a 'd,' because everyone knows that purposely misspelling things is what all the cool internet kids are doing nowadays.

Also, it forms the word 'odd,' and everyone also knows that cheesy puns are the one thing KEWLer than intentional misspelling.

I'd like to thank everyone who contributed to this (anything but pointless) thread for giving me several ideas for inventory items in my next game.

And so that my post features something more constructive than bum-kissing, here are a few ideas of my own:

an omni-virus that can infect both computers and animals
a device that can magically make things heavier
paint to change the colors of other items
a tape recorder that can store a player's typed message to play back later
(possibly to convince an NPC that you're in a room when you're not)
a heatray gun to heat up objects
a freezeray to do the opposite (also can make walkable paths on bodies of water)
a device that can magnetize other items
shrinkray to make things tiny/huge

hope this helps people create more creative puzzles.