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Great job bro!  That Paw-Some Sauce dog is spot-on, simultaneously cute yet disgruntling, in a Donnie Darko "Frank" sort of way.

@CaptainD: Interesting, thanks for the input!  Yes I was going for fearless distrust.

@Frikker: Also interesting.  It is supposed to be a kid -- 'youth' -- to be exact, around 15.  Hopefully the voice acting will sell his gender better, although that's not really the most important thing given he is a robot.

@Selmiak: Yeah, that was one reservation I had about the second version.  More cyberpunky pizazz, more robotic detailing, but also less relatable, possibly.  And he is a fairly central sympathetic character, so if he is too alien, too "Terminator 1", cold-blooded Terminator, that could be an issue.

Thanks all for the feedback, this helps a lot with my chronic decision paralysis!

I could use some feedback on a couple of portraits.  If you could, just shout out which one you like better, with maybe a little about your first impression.  Don't worry about technical fixes- I just need the emotional reaction, what the character evokes to you.  Like who do you think this guy is.  You might note what particular detail was most striking though.  Thanks. 

Looks great, buddy!  Looks like it'll be a gut-busting 30 minutes.  Here's a store for yous:

Store name: Pawsome Sauce
Store color: Red
Store detail: A place that sells barbecued / deepfried meats on sticks in the shape of cute animals like puppies, cats, chipmunks, etc..  Each 'meat stick' comes wrapped in a lolcat / cute puppy internet meme printout.
Store logo: A smiling dog giving the thumbs up.  Like a canine version of the "Buddy Christ".
Description of employee: A dude in a Disney animal costume.
Store's event: (What would happen to the player if the store's event is triggered) a flaming poodle comes running out from the back door, sets asshole dude on fire.

Suggestion for neighboring stores: Veterinarian, Chinese restaurant.

Sorry never got to adding a vote-by date.  How does Nov 3 work?  I'm on Hawaii time so you all get a 12 hour est extension (results vary based on nation of origin).

Thanks man!  It's been a learning curve doing 2D animation in AGS, but we're getting there!

I actually tend to like the painting of backgrounds nowadays.  I'll have a story, and I'll suddenly come up with something really cool by making a mistake while trying to paint a door hinge or something, and it turns into like a robotic spider that must be hacked, etc etc...

I have a more painterly art style though that is very interpretive in the Giger sense (objects are more subjective than object-ish).  This may not work for you but I would suggest looking at mistakes as sometimes the greatest strokes of genius, if you know how to airbrush them right.

[You can tell a story]

I don't have a lot of market research at my fingertips, but I do believe in the old maxim that it's better to "build it and they will come", and by "It" I mean, something great.  Have the audience chase you rather than try to figure out what is "hot" at any given moment and chase that ephemeral moving target.  I've seen a lot of game devs, some RL-friends of mine too, study the "top ten Apple / Android store" games and try to duplicate the gameplay /  marketing strategy of those "trending" games, and it tends to backfire IMHO. 

I will say that AGS wasn't my first choice.  It's been a long and convoluted road to my de-rezzing.  And by de-rezzing I mean going from ultra-hi-res, terapixel, vertex-shaded, Occulus-Rift virtual-realism games down to basic 3D, to freeware Unity 2D, to 320x200 pre-x86 graphics of AGS. 

The first factor was having slaved for 18 months, 12 hours a day, (what is that, 2 and a quarter years of fulltime jobbery!?!?) doing every single thing from 3D modelling to skinning to 2D UI to level building to programming in the pre-Cambrian zoo of Unreal 1, full of malformed, easily breakable code...  (Deep breath) Voice acting, writing, music, all that nonsense, and then being unable to actually sell the game because it was a mod of an extremely well-lawyered, Iron-Fisted IP (Deus Ex), I decided NEVER AGAIN.  Never again 3D, unless I could get ahold of a dedicated team at least and ideally an army of competent game devs.  While the result was pretty well-reviewed, and I actually had some fairly substantial donators along with the 'kudos', it just was not temporally nor financially feasible to try to do any more games at that level, ESPECIALLY not for free.  ( if you want to see the result, Terminus Machina < )

So I figured on scaling down to something 2D, maybe a retro platformer, with some personal flair and tweaks.  That was Unity 2D, which proved yo be again WAY too much goddamn work to grok with my work/wife/spawn-afflicted brain.  Trying to remember the quarternion rotation of the scalar Z axis to get a goddamn mutalien bug to move 3 steps without being friction-frozen by the physics engine, just no.  And then having to program the entire taxonomy, the object-oriented world logics of player, enemy, bullet, collision detection and all of that jazz- no no NO no, fuck you Unity, I'll put you on the backburner.  At least until the Singularitarian Googaloids kick the brain-augmentation project or human cloning to lighten the workload, or I become a more likable, less control-freaky person who actually attracts competent team members.

None of these things seemed of a high probability in the near future.

Thus AGS.  What I like:

* You can tell a story, a pretty awesome story, the cultural norms of Lucasian/Sierra-esque p-n-cs involve a high appreciation of story, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable programmer-art.  The literary appreciation of the audience exceeds any other game genre, IMHO*.  I love this!  Because I am at heart a sci-fi / spec-fic / transreal-fiction writer.  I'm about the ideas and characters.  Read way too much Gibson and Burroughs for my own good. 

* You don't need TEH SPECTAKUL mindblowing 3D, being able to make out the sebum seeping from the pores of the gritty vaguely-caucasian, quietly macho protagonist with the stealth-sword-cannon is not necessary, and in fact somewhat detrimental in the genre.  YES!  Fuck graphics!  I don't mean fuck art itself, and I believe that most AAA and even many A / I ('Indie') titles bank on wowing the player into not realizing they're not artists but a bunch of engineers just reproducing "photoreality" or simulacra of nerd culture that was once art (lightsabers, orcs, etc) but is now just the excreta of a 3D xerox machine.  You can actually paint something that has some artistic content outside of "WOAH LOOKS TOTS COOL BRO!", conveys some more sophisticated emotion, comments / critiques society / reality, etc....

* You don't need to reinvent the wheel universe.  AGS has built-in all the programming you need!  Yes, you can add in advanced particle physics and a Starcraft-style RTS engine if you want, and that's great, go you if you do so, but you don't NEED to.  See paragraph 4 sentence III, clause C, on "Being an overworking loner who ain't got time fo dat".

* You can take it commercial without being an Einstein of IP lawyers or some supermassive world-eating conglomerate like Disney capable of buying out whole canons with one fell swoop of the checkbook.  Valve tried very briefly to let modders rake in some remuneration but we all know how that backfired spectacularly.  Unity and Unreal are awesome and the 5% or "pay once you sell X" is great, they're powerful, way the fuck overpowered for my purposes in fact, but again, there is way too much learning curvature there, and I just couldn't make escape velocity.

So, that's why AGS.  I don't know if "The Market Is Primed" for 80's-tastic retrofutures examining the neofeudal, enclavish nature of human society and the potentiality for mass-injustice inherent in the ramping up toward the invention of Artificial General and then Super Intelligence. 

That's what my game, Neofeud is kinda about.  I don't know if there's a 'clear rise in adventure gaming' of that particular sort.

But the market can go fuck itself.  As David Simon, creator of The Wire once said, "Markets are good for making people really fucking rich.  And not much else."  If I just tried to chase "What games there are a rise in," I would probably end up making a whole lot shittier game, with a lot less heart in it, be less happy making it, and people will feel that.  Feel the sell-out.  It vibes bro, for serious. 

So yeah, I don't know.  I think your concept looks cool.  Just do it.

*Literary nature of the games is probably because the players are heavily British, lol.  =D

COP: "Why the hell are you smoking anyway?  You're silicon and chrome -- you ain't got lungs or any meatware to get a buzz."
PROTO-J: "You old whack honky- smoking be straight up about flexin' dat style.  Don't you see how I'm killin dat bad-boy look?"

I've now got over 50% of the backgrounds done, just working on fleshing out the characters, implementing the hundred thousand lines of script, all that fun-sauce.

Everything is a bit bright and low-contrast?  I'd drop the brightness a bit and up contrast if you have that function in the program you're using. 

Good start though!  Art is scary, I know.  But just punch it in the nose and it will swim away! 

Ponch - (Based on They Live?)

No way, dude! My entry is based on the unappreciated (and admittedly lackluster) later-era Carpenter's "Ghosts of Mars." It's a bit of a misfire of a movie in execution, but I really dig the premise of the movie. Check it out, why not? You might like it.

Oh right!  Yes I have actually seen Ghosts of Mars.  I probably should've read the story before 2AM, when I had all the mental faculties of a zombie!

[Best Protagonist:]

Woah!  Is it hot in here or is that just Kirk Russel's career re-igniting? 

No!  The heat is Kirk Russel breathing down my neck waiting to snap it offhandedly!!  Awesome jobs guys!



Well it's that time again!  Time to get your credit cards out and try to bribe the host (me) with John Carpenter blu-ray collectors edition box sets!

But seriously, great entries all around!  I'm happy everyone was able to dig deep into their souls, their backyards, their subliminal media messaging and pull out their own personal Carpenters.  I don't think we had a single non-Carpentarian entry!  This will be hard!

The entries:

WHAM - (Based on The Thing?)
Sinitrena - Noise of Silence
Baron - Escape From The Things
Ponch - (Based on They Live?)

And here are Our Categories:

Best Protagonist: Wrestlemania muscles optional.
Best Plot: Carpenter's signature is his tackling of bold and creative premises such as an alien invasion run through corporate propaganda or the turning of New York into a walled-in penal colony. 
Best Dialog: Doesn't have to be bubble gum related, or indicative of impending violence, but must be iconic and sayable by an Austrian immigant!
Best Atmosphere: Make it thick as bad 80's fake blood!
Best Writing Style: Bonus points for the best one-liners! (Bubblegum and impending violence optional)

(In the case of a tie) Most Carpentarian: Hopefully it doesn't come to this!  It's going to be tough!

Since I am a n00b contest hoster, what would be a reasonable date to have the votes in by?

Ok, but you'll need to work the fake blood and welts into the story somehow!  Just kidding!

Instant grow and shrink?  Sounds really awesome!  I'd like to see that animation

Two days left, guys!  Go go go!

@Creamy: Haha, yes, Nintendo is much friendly and G-rated   Thanks!

@Blondbraid: Lol!  Yes I hope you get some serious feels from Neofeud, of all kinds.

It's better, but now it mostly looks like a car crash.  I still think you need more town on fire.  More fire in the background, less soft evening-light-looking, more dramatic and stark?  One's home on fire is a terrible thing, man!  And this is your opening shot; punch up the drama and grab the player!

[Future machines are not only smart as humans: they're also well-armed and grumpy.]

Future machines are not only smart as humans: they're also well-armed and grumpy.

"Warning!  You are illegally tampering with government property."



"Oh shit.  No, no!  I'm, I'm a government employee, officially officiating... official government activities...  Definitely NOT tampering-  I was just testing your, uh, structural integrity, you know, in case of a real energy thief tamperer."

"(Tap tap) Yep!  You're nice and solid and theft deterring, alright!"

"Continued infractions detected.  As a pseudo-sentient Artificial Consciousness I am hereby authorized to neutralize you until arrival of police."

"NO NO NO!  No neutralization necessary!  Emergency Shutdown!  Uh, remember the first rule of robotics, 'I must not allow harm to come to a human-'"



"I'm sorry, there was a slight miscalculation in neutralization measures.  Medical personnel have been alerted, and will be arriving shortly.  Thank you for choosing EnerGenius."

I worked up an idea for what you might do to make the town look like a town on fire.  Just throw some things that look like actual buildings.  You need the reference point there for the human eye to detect scale. 

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/QAgKRLA.png[/imgzoom]

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/N0EmIji.jpg[/imgzoom]

See the difference?  The little black squiggles were an improvement, but they could still just be a pile of firewood.  Put some rectangular upright things in there that resemble buildings.

Great start!

Some suggestions:

* Add some details inside of the truck, maybe  something that looks like it could be a door or a handle.  It just looks to me like some very small archway right now.

* The fire does look like a sunset or a big campfire at best, to me.  If you want to communicate that a town -- as in several wooden buildings -- are being razed in flames, then you need more there, there.  And by there I mean bigass flames, engulfing actual buildings.



You don't need to make the pic hi-res or anything, but consider having a partially-disintegrated house' silhouette in dark black over a mass of flames.  Flames licking up through the windows.  You kind of have a disembodied orangey-yellow blob right now, which is why it is a very good psychoanalytical tool.  And that can be intentional, if you want to disorient the player, make the game intentionally vague, but if you want them to get that 'the town is on fire' I don't think it works.

* Things close to that fire should be really freakin' daylight-bright.  A town on fire is like a giant million-watt lamp.  It's a little too muted.  Blast objects, trees, the ground, those non-burning houses with spotlights.

* Brighten up that road a bit so it's easier to tell it's a road.  That will help the player to register the truck as well.

Just my two cents.