Messages

@Snarky:  Thanks!  Yes Art Rage does have layers.  I just exported the pic really quickly forgetting half the foundation of the central supermansion, and hand-painted it in quick, just to get it out on the internet before going out to paint the town red, etc..  I've racked up a solid bible-worth of layer-pages for this particular artwork.  Could probably do with some curating actually, remove some of the old subdermal detritus of old thrown-out brush strokes.

@Lasca: Hi, and thanks for the esteem boost!  I wasn't sure if I had a style going or just a lot of random and poorly controlled muscle spasms passing for brush strokes!  I am going for a more expressionist / impressionist tone here to convey the undercurrents of the science-fictional world.

Shoot!  Yes those spotlights need some airbrush TLC... very broomsticky.  Nice catch!

@Cassie: Thanks!  Hm, well that's one for red, two votes for blue dress.  Poles are still open!

Thanks Cassie and Bavolis.

@Cassie: Nice catch with the aura -- that was slipshod Photoshopping just to get something out of my art software and up for a critique.   Great eye for finding the cracks!

@Bavolis: Thanks for the tips from a real pro, sorry I can't pay you for the consultation   I chose to handpaint the railings to give it a bit more painterliness.  I was trying to go more analog, traditionalist (Art Rage instead of Photoshop as a modus operandi) and paint manually as much as possible, even though this takes longer.  Operating under the notion that this might lend a bit more cohesive style and character to everything given the idiosyncrasies of actual paint-on-canvas.  I'll consider putting away the (paint) bottle and going more straight-edge, in the future though.  Definite time-saver!

Simultaneous senior moment / present-shock!  Totally thought that Dubai pic was some sort of artistic rendering for Blade Runner II, etc..



Latest version here: modified the front-stage lighting to more aureate-tone... suggest she's a point-one-percenter standing on a Smaug-esque mountain of gold, and also trying to legitimize the yellow-orange light cast horizon-ward onto the 70% angle structures.

Especially the halo (or in this case, oily miasma) of neon-filled cloud surrounding the buildings.  Shanghaied from a photo of Dubai superscrapers piercing fog

Also added the "enemy" *chateau forts placed about a mile out.  Hopefully these rival feuding castles lend enough credibility to get the audience to invest in this "Game of Thrones meets Bladerunner" speculative fiction pitch.

(*presumably the others belong to House Tyrell and House Stark  )

Hm, you know I think I forgot to take those buildings on the right side out of the pic.  They were part of some previous iteration of the scene that should've been thrown out, my bad.

Thanks for your input, good to hear someone digs the gloomy aspect.  It's an acquired taste thing I guess.

The first one is actually completed digitally painted in Art Rage, no photography in the making.  The central building is intentionally colossal in comparison to the surrounding buildings, and so I set it in the middle ground to emphasize its scale, although it's location could be made more obvious.  I was going for something more subtle there, probably a bit too subtle with the low contrast.  The colors at the base are supposed to be more dull / swamp-o-sphere looking to emphasize the grandeur of the castle in contrast to the "unwashed lowborn masses" who presumably live below.  I'll see about maybe brightening things up a bit.

Thanks for you opinion on this, and glad you enjoyed the femme fatale in blue.  (I guess if you take the blue pill and make an arrangement with Mouse... )

WIP of the title graphic / ingame background for Neofeud, a game I'm currently porting to AGS from Shadowrun Returns.

I dub this, "Journey Of Self-Discovery That I'm Not An Artist."  I'm still on the look out for one, so I'm doing my own in the mean time.  Took me.... God don't want to think about it how many dozens of hours.  Still not sure if this fuster cluck of an art project is shaping up to be something more than an arrangement of proportionless rectangles drawn by an epileptic ferret, who forgot to snort half his coke lines and passed them off as, "city lights".  Sorry, had to get that self-hate fest out, it's just been a lot of really frustrating evenings.

Any suggestions on... anything, especially how to get the buildings to be a bit more... believable?

I'm trying to imply feudal trappings and near-future sci/spec-fic subtext, simultaneously.  That's the diarrhea-and-bile color palette plaguing the lower half, where the "low-borns" live.  Flea bottomites, Chiba City rejects. 

Overall I'm going for Neo-reactionary-ism, taken to the nth degree. Dark Enlightenment manifest destiny, a libertarian wet dream.

I'm trying to hone in on some of the cornerstone symbolism on which to pour the cement, or cobbletone as it may occur... I need the "Pillars" so to speak. Reminds me, need to add Greco-Roman pillars to that balcony, fluted.  Needs more gold maybe.  Gilded.

If you're not sure what the hell I'm talking about, join the club!

Thanks for having a look, in advance!

P.S.  Here's anot.er earlier version.  Didn't like it all that much, but it has the title in it!

I'm giving it a shot in 1024x768, but before I start bringing anything into the game I'm going to get some background work done, to get a vertical slice of the workflow, and to see if my inner Monet can cut it aesthetics-wise in that res (wager is 50-50 at this point).  If not, I guess it's time to hit the artist labor market or fire up the retro gun and pixelate.

How is 768 on mobile devices like Android etc?  Any game industry cool-hunter types know what is the current adventure gaming zeitgeist with regards to pads and such?  Are most people in this genre still on PCs or do you think there is crossover to the tablet / pad market? 

So far it appears that changing to "Use game setup configuration" in preferences has fixed the issue.  Thanks! 

@SilverSpook: I see that you've a great sense of humour. Why don't you try my feeble attempt? (I'm sorry for the advertisement but I only suggested it to know your feedback on humour, etc).

I've never been accused of being so funny; this is so novel!  Actually I tend to open that way, with humor, to avoid being cyber-lynched, as has been the case when an outsider butts into an established internet village such as this one... but those folks were far less... pleasant?  Mature?

Anyway, yes, I will have a look at your comic adventure, Adeel.  I've got a whole heap of researching to do, into this adventure fare, as I harken from the strange and absurdly violent planet of first person shooters like Deus Ex and 3D isometric post-apoc RPGs like Fallout. 

While we're on that topic... is comedy pretty popular among the adventure audiences nowadays?  Full disclosure: the games that I have created are actually only off-handedly, and darkly funny, in the way that a Kafka-esque prison labor camp dedicated to retweeting Kim Kardashian is funny.  I'm more of a cautionary tale sci-fi sort of guy, but maybe that's too stale and 2012 nowadays.

I'm debating what direction to take my current project -- Neofeud -- which one of my Deus Ex modding comrades is helping me port over to AGS.  Maybe I'll consider going a lighter comedic route.  I definitely need to cut down on the corporatese jargon and the goddamn soliloquys.  I am a total addict to the wall-of-text faux pas.  About half my time I spend chainsawing through character lines that accidentally exploded into novels and popped the dialog bubble.  I mean who the hell talks like that, outside of Quentin Tarantino characters and tenured English professors?

I'm trying to get the game from stretching the display each time I rebuild.  It seems I have to go into "game settings" after building and reselect "2x filtering" before running the game or it reverts to no sidebars and stretched display.  Just wondering if there's a workaround for this since it becomes kind of tedious when you're doing a lot of building and running.

Ah, I see, thanks for the feedback and answer.  Perhaps I'll ask the more technical question of if there's some workaround that allows you to have the builder maintain the sidebar in the advanced thread.

To be sure, going for proper hi-res would attract another type of audience than we're used to. There are very large groups of potential players who would never touch anything less than 1024x768.

From the top of my head I can't name any completed AGS game that uses 1024x768. But again, that is mostly because of the nostalgia glasses you get after your first month on the forums. 640x480 games, however, are all around the database and they do tend to look just as nice as the amount of effort poured into them.

Interesting, thanks.  That's kind of what I was thinking, that you could reach a wider audience with the higher res, but it would be much more challenging.

I have several portrait-type paintings that go pretty high res (some over 1024).  Haven't very many backgrounds at the moment.

I've been having one issue with 1024 res which is that I can't keep the game from reverting back to a "stretched" display.  If I build, then go to "Run Game Setup" and set "2x anti-aliasing" then "save and run", I get the sidebars and the non-stretched display.  But if I try to rebuild and run again, it goes back to no sidebar and stretched display.  I use the "run without debug" option since I can't run windowed in 1024.

I'm beginning my AGS project now and was wondering if 1024 resolution works well enough on most machines to be worth it.  I've got some pretty high-res art that could benefit from the extra pixels, I think.  I'm just worried it's going to cause headache if there are a lot of errors, or turn people off to the game when they can't get the thing to run, or run without a lot of lag.  Have there been any successful 1024 x 768 games?  Also, is it very difficult to put out another lower res version after production is complete or would it be a serious hassle?

Oh man, no pressure!  I do tend towards hyperbolic black comedy, actually.

This may be veering off topic, and I apologize if so, but where do you recommend I post what I have in the works thus far?  I'm a bit scared/embarrassed to post in the "In Production" thread just because my quasi-coherent shambles of a game concept will pale in comparison to what is there.  But, I'd also like to show a bit of what I have just to bounce some ideas around, see what might be working, what will probably not, what the adventure market is primed for or not.  The game I was working on was created, as I mentioned, in Shadowrun Returns, so it was originally being geared for a modern computer RPG.  The adventure genre seems a bit... well, less combat-centric, obviously.  The last adventure I played was Primordia, which I loved to death.

I love this community already!  Free coffee all around! 

I +1 Ghost's idea about focusing on that cool thing about your game.  I think I need to go back and rediscover that cool thing, and just get the prototype version of it slapped together.

In seriousness, I have been having trouble scrounging up the motivation to work on my project.  The previous engine I was working in, Shadowrun Returns, apparently went through a brief honeymoon phase (read: 75% off Steam sale).  Since the end of summer, there's nothing left of the community but tumbleweed and orphaned brainchildren.  I refreshed the workshop forum every six hours for about five days before finally signing the divorce papers.  Packed up my boxes of C#, Google Doc Storyline and .PNG photoalbum, went back onto the game engine market, saddened but resolved. 

To quote a favorite author of mine, William Gibson, "A little camaraderie goes a long way."  I've already found a second wind, a new enthusiasm in the past 36 hours since happening upon AGS.  So thank you all for being here, responsive, and welcoming.  Hopefully we will all go a long way.

Often the answer to life's riddles is: Drink more coffee.

I adhere to this aphorism with extreme prejudice.  Unfortunately my pancreas exploded the other day, but that's what those newfangled 3D printed organs are for.

Fantastic!  Thanks for the welcome.  I like it here already!

Hi all!

I've been developing or modding games sporadically as a job and then a hobby for about fifteen years.  I've worked mostly with FPS engines like Unreal, Half Life.  My biggest project (if not quite a tour de force) was Terminus Machina, a Deus Ex 1 total conversion in which I basically went padded-room insane doing everything from writing to programming to concept art to UI to 3D modeling to music et. al.  While the game made a front-page splash on the Moddb site and got mid-90% on the ratings.... NEVER AGAIN!!!  For one, I almost got divorced and fired from all three of my dayjobs and had CPS take my kids away.  For two, Deus Ex is a proprietary engine whose clandestine and eldritch copyright webwork between Warren Spector, Eidos, Square, blah blah means I could never make a dime off the thing outside of begging for Starbucks chump change donations and a handful of Bandcamp soundtrack sales.  For three... I've been having difficulty escalating to that William Burroughs-grade state of insanity to work that hard, which is probably a good thing.  Wifey and shrinky say so, anyway.

So -- Adventure Game Studio!  Yes! 

I'm at the core a writer / programmer.  Mostly I'm a poser artist, and I'm only a musician when I'm trying to get laid -- which is unnecessary given the marriage hookup, nowadays.  So it seems AGS will be the perfect rehab for me.

The game I want to make is an amorphous blob consisting of 20,000 random acts of futurism, flavorful but fragmented character prototypes, and subversive Marxist diatribe disguised as printed emails, item descriptions, and loading screen backstory. 

But essentially, it's Game of Thrones meets Blademancer... I mean Neurorunner.  The Bladetrix.  You know what I mean.

Instead of the Dashiel Hammetian neo-noir detective, you get to be the CEO, the Tyrell dude.  Except the Tywin Lannister of 2060 has performed a corporate coup on your formerly market-dominating megacorp, and you have to restore your family's "House" to its former glory.  That's the elevator pitch anyway.

I was working with the Shadowrun Returns engine but... there are more ebola patients surviving than players on SRR at the moment, and it's $30 to get the game and expansion needed, and you cant program, add sound, models, music, can't sell your game....  So again, Adventure Game Studio!!!  Yeah!

The thing is workingly titled Neofeud.  I want to port this thing to AGS.

Go check it out maybe if you haven't already filed for a restraining order.