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Pixie I cannot use be cause of the EXTREMELY MILD nudity, perhaps if you add a loincloth down *there*, and another up *there* then I will gladly use it!

Heh-heh. Forgot that kids will likely be getting their hands on this - though I figured that she'd been covering her naughty bits adequately. Anyway, I'll whip some clothing up.

EDIT: Here ya' go, ya' big prude, you. 

And as added above, mine is from "The Lord of the"..., I mean, "Army of Darkness".  :

Here's more...

BANSHEE
The banshee is a creature, perhaps a ghostly apparition, that vaguely resembles a human female. These tend to be seen around places of worship or graveyards and are considered a very bad omen... Their glass-shattering wails can bring a man to his knees.



ORANGE WORM
These deadly predators have poisonous, paralysing bites and the females will sometimes lay their eggs inside their still-living, but  immobilized prey.



MAN-EATING FROG
No one's quite sure how, but over time this large species of frog has aquired a taste for human flesh. Curiously, unlike any other known frog, they have complex, organized social structures, and tend to hunt in small packs.




FAIRY (or PIXIE or NIXIE)
A tiny, sometimes benevolent, sometimes mischevous creature. Can be vicious and form swarms if they feel threatened. Though tiny, they wield some powerful magic and can summon and control the powers of nature.

From "Army of Darkness":



This is my BOOMSTICK!

(and my first sprite jam, I think...)

EDIT: oh, and that's 23 colours, in case anyone cares.

shit. double posted. I though for sure there was a delete option here.

But anyway, I guess I'd like to be included in the credits as Ozwalled if you use any of this.

Here's my monsters. Take 'em if y' like.

(EDIT: just realized I was supposed to post the names UNDER the pictures... oh well, I'm sure you're smart enough to figure it all out...)

STONEBORER
This rare tentacled mass feeds on farious minerals, and tends to be found in caves or ruined buildings, slowly digesting the minerals found in rocks with acis it secretes from its muscular tentacles. Has been known to firecly defend its territory when approached and has a taste for the metal of adventurers' armor and weapons.



BIGMOUTH (change the name if you like)
These menacing creatures have large, pointy teeth and are notorious for biting peoples' torso off.



CARRION BEAST
Essentially a mean, sentient compost heap (with arms).  Constantly roaming dark, damp areas in search of rotting material, but they don't pass up opportunities to kill and devour the living, either.



Oh, and if you want to include me (Ozwalled, or Oz for short) in the game, I'm male, pale, have short brown hair and pretty much ALWAYS wear a hat of some sort.

Yeah -- that rug really ties the room together.

Much better... but there's still a frame where his left heel's all big.

The first  one does look better, IMO, but please make the bad thicker, like Darth's, at least.

Forgot to add that an Instagame Template with all the graphics all in there and the GUI in there and all ready to go would probably have encouraged more (of us lazy) people to use it. Proabably still would, too.

Congrats to Sierrafreak, even though the two other entries were very nice, too (liked yours alot, Puddin'... I'm really liking your style lately). Best of luck to everyone next time around. 

I downloaded IG a while back. I think the reason I've not released anything with it, more than anything, was that the pixel art was good to a point that I was a bit intimidated. "What if I want to add in another character?" I asked myself. I just didn't think I'd be able to match up to its quality (my thinking has since changed a bit, but I'm still no artist).

On the other hand, just LOOKING at some of the stuff and playing around with it has been very useful to help me learn about AGS, so I'm definitely glad I downloaded it.

First off, I have no game out either. So take this for what it's worth, I guess.

Anyway, these are what I found helped me a lot:

1) Play with the Demo Game and other open souce things, taking a look at the manual here and there. Make some different things happen, like adding in new dialogue, adding a new inventory item (and getting it in the game as a result of doing something), making a door somehere that leads you to a different room, etc... Doing these sorts of things helped build my confidence that, yes, even *I* could make AGS do some things that I wanted it to do. Empowering, I tells ya'. And yeah, I'd also reccomend that you start off heavy with the interation editor, as it gives you easier results quicker than scripting does, at first. You can do a surprising amount of cool stuff with it, acually.

2) Read through each and every part of the manual, from start to finish. ALL OF IT! For each of the different fuctions that you come across, try to think of some way that you'd be able to use it to do something neat in a game (you don't need to come up with an idea for each function, but try to have a few ideas here and there, at least). Try to be creative! Write these ideas down somewhere, even if they seem sort of lame. Once you're done the manual reading and now have a list of ideas, go back to the demo game (or some other open source project, OR even be brave and start your own test game if you like) and start trying to implement ONE OR TWO of those ideas. Getting some of your little ideas to work on your screen can be surprisingly satisfying (I remember feeling all giddy when I got a character to follow my main character across the screen and from room to room). Once you get a couple of things working, just keep it going.

Well, that's pretty much how I started to get into things anyway. Hope it's of some help.

I personally feel that  the "mass murder prison site transformed into a town" idea sounds too... contrived... or made up... or something (no offense meant).

If you're going for the serious/ drak/ gritty angle, I'd much prefer a setting with much less storybook-like origins.

I think of a city that's somewhat Vegas-like, myself, with similar origins -- built out in the middle of nowhere, more or less, maybe partly to avoid interference from the law from some of its shadier operations (gambling, illicit sex trade, money-laundering, alcohol-running during times of prohibition, conterfeiting, drug-running, bootlegging, etc., etc., etc.)

All that having been said, I like the idea of another continuous universe kind of thing that's a little more condusive to different types of stories being told. I wish you the very best of luck with it.

As for a title, I'd like to suggest "Black Knights".

I thought about Alice after having played it, and IMO, it's not so great a game so much as it is visually stunning. Game-wise, I really don't think there's all that much about it that was so great.

Still, it's well worth playing for the visuals alone. There's some weird and wonderful stuff going on in that game. If you can find it on the cheap, I'd say play it for sure.

Voice acting, of course (as people have said) can be good or bad. Yes, Sam & Max, and Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango were examples of great voice acting, but take something like the original Resident Evil, for example (not the remake), and you have a perfect example of how voice acting can be downright painful to listen to.

That having been said, I still like voice acting a lot (despite the fact that I was playing games before talkiness came along). Even the "cheap" examples of it (including some of the AGS games that have included bits of voice acting). Heck, despite the pain, I even enjoyed Resident Evil's talking cutscenes to some extent.

For me, it's all about that extra element of personality.

So here's my suggestion, GarageGothic, based on my experience playing Planescape: Torment -- if you're worried aboutthe amount of dialog, consider using voice acting for important characters' first lines in the game and for some of the key or more dramatic lines the characters will say. I thought that Planescape: Torment did this with a good deal of success: you got a better idea of the main characters' personalities this way, and it made it easier to voice them in your head for the non-voiced lines.

HOWEVER, I'd also say that it may not be worth your while if the characters you've built up aren't real big on personality (see the Mario example, for instance). But maybe that's just me.

I think I'll wait a bit (like, another day) and "declare" voting to be over, at which time the new winner can start the next Sprite Jam at some point.

At least that's what I was told last time...

Well, voting's open (so if you have a last minute entry, like I did last time to win, now would be the time to send it in).

And though I really like all three of the entries a lot, I have to go with SierraFreak's., mostly because it best captured the pure bedlam that I'd hoped for.

Great stuff so far, people! Thanks for entering, too. 

Thanks, people!

And as far as it having to be a very long game, I wa sthinking of the possibility of justthe opposite. A fairly short game that, if played at different times, might yield slightly different situations.

And I don't know how I missed that in the manual. Sorry.