Messages

Thank you everyone for the ideas. I'm gaining a lot through this. I especially like what you've done with that little mound on the right side. Surprising how that vague tone helps. I think I'll adapt that a bit. I'd also toyed with the idea of making the sun the same shade as the sand. It would certainly save me an extra tick on my color count.

And Geraduatuza, thank you for the remix there - unfortunately, it's impractical since I'm trying to keep my color count as low as possible, and doing everything entirely by hand (pixel for pixel). It looks cool, I'll certainly give you that, but doesn't really work for my purposes. Thank you anyway!


Aaaand... Implemented. Still have the extra tone for the sun. I'm still debating on that one. If I keep it, I may put some highlights on the sand using it.

Hey Evil - Thanks for the food for thought. I'm rehauling the image as we speak, and have made a few modifications.



Not 100% sure about that far-left red item you were talking about, but did work a bit on fixing the objects lining up around the two tones of the sky.

Also, I made another edit to the sun's shade, but I'm worried that it's getting a little too bright and starting to draw too much attention to itself...

Thanks for the thoughts, PixelPaw & Jakerpot. I've taken a few of your ideas, but I don't think I'm going to be employing everything. I actually desaturated the tone for the sun a bit, but left most of the other tones intact. I just felt that the color as you had it right now was a little too low-contrast and kinda looked like custard, or something of the sort.

Also, I'm planning on keeping the sun as mostly circular, as the sun ultimately is just a big round ball. And looking through the haze of a really dusty atmosphere, it's likely to come across as such, in my opinion. I may fiddle with the sun's color a little more as well.

Hi, Ookki, welcome to the forums (I know technically you've already made a few posts, but hey, you can never be too welcome).

The first thing that really pops out in my mind here is that when the curtain is open, your shadows seem a bit off. Like they're lit from above, although the window seems to be the only light source? The composition of the room is pretty decent, though sparse in places - but by no means does it look bad.

One thing you may want to consider is working out your vanishing point to fix up the perspective a bit. At the moment, every z-axis line you have is a perfect diagonal. While that keeps lines clean, it does make the room feel a bit skewed. I like the 3/4 top-down angle - it reads well, but the objects would feel a little more proportional with a more well-defined perspective. If you'd like some examples of this, just let me know and I'll be happy to show you what I mean.

Also, your bottom screenshot seems to be the same as the top one. Maybe you linked the wrong picture?

Sounds like a great idea, Jakerpot. You can definitely improve the visual quality of the room by avoiding any 100% black lines unless absolutely necessary/appropriate, and instead using darker shades of the active colors in your background. I think you could do wonders for that pipe if you rounded it out - you'll also note, of course, that its bottom is above your horizon (a horizontal line running through your vanishing point), so you should be able to see the hole in the bottom of the pipe.

And yes, spend all the time you need on the background to make it look great - The more you focus and work on making one background look great, the better the following backgrounds will be. Don't rush your game, take the time to do it right and it'll be that much better for it.

[Update]

Hey folks. I'm trying to expand my horizons a bit and work on my background art, and hopefully also bolster my portfolio a bit that way as well. I started this landscape here, and got quite a ways in so far, but I've basically run into a roadblock. I'm relatively happy with the background, but the sandy foreground leaves a bit to be desired. Would anyone be able to offer some advice on how to fix it up?


Original (Pre-C&C)


Newest (Post-C&C)

I'm really trying to avoid creating extra colors just for AA. I've already hit 10, but the top of the large hulking technological behemoth in the background is a bit jaggy (above the darker half of the sky), and basically everything on the sand as well. Regardless of how finished it is, this background is going into a CD of my portfolio I'm sending out on Monday (Sunday for most of you, I suppose), so Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Also, if any of the Pixel BG people out there could take a look at the steps I'm taking, and tell me if I'm doing everything bass-ackwards, please let me know what I can do to streamline.



Update x3

Alright, brief update to show what changes I've started making. I actually sort of did the opposite of what SpacePaw suggested by darkening the low tones using a nearly unused AA tone - I just really prefer the high contrast, as it creates a much more stark environment.

Fixed some shading issues where shadows should have been pointing in the other direction. Now that I've had some time to rest, I've also healed my laziness and am getting really down 'n dirty with the pixels - no more sloppy shading down below. About 1/3 of the way through, and will continue to work my way to the right.

Also added yet another tone, specifically for the purposes of Anti-aliasing at the top of the 'technological behemoth' in the background so that the top won't be quite so jaggy.

x2: With a few comments by Evil, I think I was able to fix a few compositional issues and make it an overall stronger piece. The right side of the foreground is still a bit stark, but I think that the high contrast does wonders for it.

x3: Very small edit - added a little depth to the darker area on the right part of the foreground. Thanks, SpacePaw!

xWhatever: I made a drastic alteration to the palette following some of the advice imparted to me by wise master Progz, and also fixed a small issue with over-AA in a dune or two. Also, there was some gnarly banding going on around the sun (Thanks Helm!), that I took steps to rectify.

Definitely looking a lot better than before. Might I suggest not actually having the candle lit in the background and consider animating it as an object in the engine in-game? It'll add a lot, I think.

Also, You might want to think about making the pipe/tube coming out of the ceiling rounder - at the moment it looks pretty flat. If you really want to improve the room, I might also suggest adding some sort of texturing to your ceiling and floors, as with the walls so nicely done, they look a little nondescript. But so far, so good. I really like what I'm seeing here.

Hi Jakerpot,

What most of the others have been trying to point out is that the way objects are percieved to slant is based on the theoretical artistic convention known as a vanishing point. any object whose lines are perpendicular (lined up with one another) will follow the same vanishing point, so since your cage is square and it also lines up with the left wall, its lines should also follow the same vanishing point.

There are some places where these rules don't apply, like in isometric art and top-down, but your average Adventure game background follows these rules, and even backgrounds where the art seems to break the rules, you'll be surprised to know that they actually are very deeply based in theory. True, some really wacky backgrounds like the ones you'll find in DOTT or CMI do bend the rules, but as they say: Learn the rules before you break them. That way you'll break them right.

I know it's a pain to try to master a new technique, but believe me when I say that learning the concepts of horizon and vanishing point will greatly improve your background artwork. Let me give you a practical example based on the background in question:



What I've done here is use the common line created by the walls and floor to establish my Vanishing Point (VP). From there I take the corners of all other parallel (lined up) objects and draw my z-axis (going towards and away from the screen) lines from there. Once I have my lines worked out, It's a simple matter of filling in the blanks.

When you have this technique down, it's even easier to do a background, since you don't have to muddle about trying to figure out what lines to use for any given object.

Mr. Gabriel Urbain Fauré.



This is still a work in progress, I'm still not very happy with the contrast or sepia tones, so the image will be updated over time, but I thought I'd put it here to kind of reserve the spot. I will be updating the sprite probably a few times during the course of the next few days, but here's what we've got so far.

Hey Trihan,

The comic's coming along well. I think with a little more fine-tuning and working towards having some sort of cohesive plot, you're on the way to something good. I don't know if anyone else's sent anything just yet, but I had a bit of free time, so I threw together a quick "Stickman & Rat" piece of pixel fanart for you.



Keep up the good work.

Guilty gear certainly is a great example of good pixel work 2D animation used in-game. It is very well put together, but despite looking on par with what you may find in CMI or the like, it is actually pixel art - the screenshot MashPotato linked seems to back up my point. It also doesn't seem to follow the Street Fighter series' extreme use of Selective Outlining, and I don't even notice a lot of Anti-aliasing.

I would almost go so far as to say that well-done art in this style could make for a very easy-on-the-eyes adventure game. And at only roughly about 200 pixels tall, wouldn't be so difficult to animate either. A great recent example of hand-drawn art used in a 2D environment would be the newest installment of the Street Fighter II series, as redone by UDON.

Hi Zackiz,

Welcome to the forums - glad to see another aspiring creator joining the ranks. Handdrawn is a perfectly acceptable term. A lot of the time you'll also hear it referred to as High resolution (or hi-res) 2D animation. In the case of Curse of Monkey Island, the characters were hand-drawn like traditional animation, then scanned and colored digitally, as far as I know. There are plenty of techniques to get this done, really. A lot of the hi-res artists on the forum do their concept work on regular paper, then scan and rework it in a high-end digital art tool, like Photoshop or the GiMP.

I'm actually more of a low-res animator, so I couldn't really offer much insight into what programs would be best for doing animation in hi-res, but I believe you may want to take a look at a program called Pro-Motion. Flash is also a useful tool for this, and has been utilized by some of our forum members in the past. Your other option of course is to do each frame individually and import them into the AGS editor one at a time, but that has the potential to get messy.

You can do it as professionally (i.e. painted clear cells on a special animating scanner) or bootstrap (Printer paper and a regular scanner) as you like. The end result is all contingent on how talented you are as an artist/animator.

The thread Babar linked above is more of a theory discussion, but you may learn a few things. Please feel free to join in the discussion!

Hi everyone, thank you all for your kind words and for enjoying the demo for what it's worth. It was a total coincidence that I ended up with such a similar palette to Annie Android, and semi-related theme, but I guess great minds think alike... Or fools never differ. Whichever works best.

The release wasn't exactly timed for Valentine's on purpose - our anniversary was actually late January, but it is convenient for anyone who wants to play something cutesy and romantic-ish on the upcoming holiday. I'm actually hoping to have an update to the Demo ready by then, for a sort of 'follow-up' present for my girlfriend, to whom this game remains firmly dedicated.

I'm glad the general response has been positive. I know that it's still extremely short and the puzzles probably couldn't get easier without huge signs saying "Click this, then this", but it's as much an interactive greeting card as it is a 'game'. The straightforwardness of the puzzles is likely to remain largely at this level, with lateral thinking mostly applied in a chronological manner (Like growing things, etc.). I also hope that nobody's had any problem with the interface or lack of inventory. It's my hope that even in a much larger version of the game, nobody's going to feel a necessity for a graphically represented inventory, as I feel that foregoing this will help to keep it as simplified as possible.

...hiragana (す と- り-) rather than katakana (ス ト- リ-)?
..."の" after kuma, to indicate it's the story of kuma rather than two unrelated nouns.

Hi, Technocrat - I can certainly see you've been paying attention in your Bunpou classes. Although you're certainly quoting proper rules for grammar in Japanese, the rules have a tendency to bend to the breaking point in literary and artistic works. The choice to use hiragana exclusively for the title was purely stylistic. Though technically katakana should be applied for loanwords, it's far from unheard of in the Japanese language to fudge the rules and write words using a different alphabet. Particularly in the case of children's books and media (Such as はろうきてぃ - Hello Kitty, for those who don't read Japanese), it's a common choice. The same is true for noun-story. Using the word 'Story' as a fill-in for the Japanese 物語, where the posessive の is usually omitted (Take Genji Monogatari, for example) and largely seen as unnecessary. I'd be happy to discuss Japanese grammar with you in PMs if you'd like, though - linguistics (especially Japanese) is one of my passions.

[Zyndicate]

Good evening, everybody - My sincerest apologies for taking so long to respond to this thread, I'm afraid I've had my hands tied with other projects, but I'm back and would like to announce the winner of the Sprite Jam, so that we can move on to the next competition.

Generally speaking, I like to make some comments about each character, and I may yet, if the thread isn't locked before I edit this post, but let me begin by taking all the mystery out of the thread and say congratulations to Zyndicate, for a great re-imagining of Sam & Max, Freelance vikings.

I'm really looking forward to the next competition, and can guarantee my participation.

[The Story:]

SpacePirateCaine presents:

(Kuma Story)

Kuma Story was originally created as an anniversary gift to my girlfriend for our 3-year anniversary. I'm happy to say she enjoyed it very much, and asked me to continue with the game, and share it with the rest of the world.

The game is meant for a less hardcore adventure gaming audience, so most of you should find it to be extremely easy (It may take less time to read through this post than to finish the demo). The concept revolves around a series of small, self-contained puzzles where the protagonist, "Kuma Bear" is doing nice things for his girlfriend, "Cinnamon Bear".

Please note that what little text there is in the game is generally in Japanese. There is nothing specifically important written at any point as Kuma Story is intended to be a short, mostly text-less adventure game, playable and accessible by anybody in any language. The choice to render the existing text in Japanese was made as it's the common language between myself and the person the game is dedicated to.

Outside Kuma Bear's home, and in a windy field

Please feel free to download the Demo, for a very small taste of how Kuma Story will play.

The Story:
It’s Kuma Bear’s anniversary with his girlfriend, Cinnamon Bear. He is hoping to surprise her on their anniversary with a small present, but doesn’t have anything to give to her yet. Help Kuma Bear find something nice to give to Cinnamon Bear, and a way to surprise her with it.

Playing the Game:
The game interface is meant to be very simplified - only consisting of 'walk' and 'interact'. Not all objects in the game can be interacted with, but most of the important objects stand out, so they shouldn’t be hard to find.

Left click: Kuma Bear will walk to the specified location
Right click: Kuma Bear will interact with the specified object

Progress:

• Puzzles: 10%
• Character Art: 30%
• Backgrounds: 20%
• Animation: 20%
• Scripting: 20%
• Music: 0%

Credits:
All art, animations and scripting: Luke "SpacePirateCaine" Rideout
Demo music borrowed from Crayon Physics: "Crayon Dreams" by Stian Stark (Not with permission)
Special Thanks to Shane "ProgZmax" Stevens for scripting advice

[GetFPS();]

Hi folks,

Interesting information we're seeing here, definitely, and I really don't mean to be a pill, but I'm coming back to my thread an awful lot and just getting a bunch of questions about fine-tuning walkcycles, which though really useful information, doesn't address the question I posed when I opened the thread. I'd like to repose my original question, then when that's worked out, please do feel free to keep discussing. I do like to learn as much as I can about animation in-game.

Interestingly, KhrisMUC seems to have addressed my concern to a certain extent in a different thread that was started recently:

Yes, and if an animation has a lot of equal frame delays (e.g. 4), leave them at zero, then set a frame with an original delay of 10 to 6, etc., then play the animation with a global delay of 4. In-game, the frame delay is added to the global delay and you can even use negative values (e.g. -3) to change a frame delay to e.g. 1.

Can anyone confirm that the frame delay is offset by the animation speed? It still seems flawed, as I've been working with one project where I play frames at speed 2 (Where all animation frames are set to delay of 0), and it moves roughly as smoothly as an animation I worked up with a delay of 6/60 of a second.

This leads me to believe that the standard framerate is 30 FPS, and a delay of 0 is actually 1/30 of a second. Is that right?

There is an FPS counter, actually, that doesn't seem to be very well documented:

1. Using built-in FPS counter (Debug(4,1) is possible only if debug mode is turned on.
...
GetFPS();
Returns current FPS speed.

But I haven't had much time to fiddle around with it just yet, and it seems to fluctuate a bit.

Does the animation speed arbitrarily add a delay of n FPS to existing Delay, where n=the animation speed integer? So playing an animation at a speed of 2 with an initial delay of 0(1) would return 3 (1/10th of a second)... Is this accurate?

[Edit]

Ahoy,

I'm recently working on creating a lot of very detailed animations for a project that I've been involved in, with some highly variable delays in some frames (i.e. 2 seconds here, .5 seconds there...). I'm really sorry if I've missed something, but the actual information on animation speed doesn't really seem very well documented. I know that the engine processes 40 ticks per second, so with every frame having a delay of 1 (0?), I'm looking at 40 FPS, but how does the manual delay on frames in a specific loop work into the equation?

Say I'm playing a loop with 10 frames of animation. I want the first 4 frames to be 1/10 of a second each, but the 5th frame to be 1 full second, before moving on to the 6th. At the moment, I'm setting the 5th frame with a manual delay of 40 (for 1 second), and leaving the rest with the default delay (Which seems to be 0). Afterwards, I'm animating the character with:

Character.Animate (x, y, eBlock,...) but having trouble working out what I should be choosing for my y integer. At first, I assumed it should be 4, for a default 4-frame delay, but that looks a lot slower than 1/10 of a second per frame. My question is: What is my y in relation to the delay set manually in a loop? If I run an animation with a y of 4, does it add a delay of 4 to each frame?

For some reason, it seems as though the closest I've been able to get is to animate with a y of 3, but I don't really know why, and I'd really love to know exactly how the animation system works in AGS so I can make my animation as smooth as possible in-game, and eliminate the guesswork.

Edit: I've been fiddling around with the editor - Firstly, I think I got the number 40 erroneously from watching Densming's tutorials. So assuming that the editor runs animations at 30 FPS (Which is a lot cleaner a number anyway), running at a y of 3 does make sense, if the animation speed sets the default delay for frames... but I'd still like to know if that affects the manual delay on loops? By setting it to 30, does that give it a delay of 33, or am I still way off base?

"Bawk!"

Hey Greg, long time no see.

You ought to hang on to it just in case you need to cause a disturbance at the clothing store at a later time. Just roll one of those babies past the sensors, and pandemonium! No idea what sort of real-life adventure puzzle that would involve, but you don't really have those babies very often. May as well "keep it in your inventory" until it seems like it might be useful.

Sometimes amassing seemingly useless crap can lead to good things... Or just clutter up your pockets.

[Note:]

Hi folks, I don't usually start a lot of threads on the AGS forums, but earlier in the year, there was a lot of debate, I believe partly due to a contest in the Competitions forum that I hosted, about the differences between high and low resolution artwork and their usage/viability in adventure games.

Note:
The below thread topic is very wordy and very tangental in places. Much of it was written as sort of a stream of thought in the wee hours of the morning, so I'd like to cut to the chase right here for people that don't want to slog through the enormous post below:

"What are the real differences between High and Low Resolution graphics, and what can the members of each camp do to help raise 'awareness', and perhaps assist the other group to really understand and be able to work together?"

Now, it's a no-brainer to ask whether hi-res adventure games exist or not - 2.5D games like Grim Fandango, Vampyre Story and the lot-so-lauded Escape from Monkey Island, and full 3D games like the new Sam 'n Max games or Dreamfall aside, we do have games like CMI and I know that we have lots of people in both camps, and double-agent people like myself who dabble on both sides (though in the last few years, I'll admit I've been leaning a lot further to the pixel-pushing side), but I'd just like to start up a topic for some open discussion about the merits of both sides, how they can be used within adventure gaming - particularly in our own little neck of the woods that is AGS.

I've done plenty of work in high resolution, but in the AGS scene, I consider myself almost on the hardcore end of pixel guys. I post art on Pixel Joint and have an unused account at Pixelation, and most of my work at Deviant art is also low-res sprites. I think I've fallen as much as many others in to the mindset that pixel=low-res. I suppose a lot of this stems from my extreme exposure to low res work here on AGS - almost all of the games released on this platform are low-res, but there are some very outstanding exceptions developed in our very own backyard that I think, if not revolutionizing our engine and rebranding it as a more versatile tool for both high and low res games (Please stop me if I'm wrong about Nelly, Ali), have proven that it certainly does work.

That said, are we more suited to low-resolution games here at AGS? CJ has done an awesome job of implementing usage of alpha channels, extreme color-depths and higher available resolutions, but how many of us are using them? I'd also like to talk about whether this medium of ours really is anachronistic or obsolete or not? I'm of course in the camp that would say pixel art is alive and well, and provides a great challenge (as I believe, at least, that it's a lot more difficult to really convey a lot of emotion in a character with an extremely limited palette, etc, and I love the challenge that it provides). But what about our high-resolution brethren?

High Resolution
We have some very talented hi-res guys here. loominous, zyndicate and Misj' stand out recently as very active contributors, and were key faces in the above-linked debate about the sprite jam representing the high resolution side of the coin. I really respect their work, but at times, I question the viability of their sprites based on my own preconceptions of how a sprite should fit on the screen, so to speak.

Let me mention again, in game development, I'm mostly low-res. I open up the images in my sprite editor of choice, GraphicsGale (Which you'll note is designed for pixel art) and end up with some very interesting issues.

1) 2) 3)
(Apologies to loominous for using these images without asking first)

1: Pristine .PNG image, clipped from loominous's most recent Sprite Jam entry
2: What happens when I use a 0-tolerance fill tool on the background, attempting to make a transparent solid-color background)
3: Who knows what happened there. Looks like something went majorly screwy with the alpha during a copy-paste.

Basically, this is one of those technological issues that can trip up someone, especially who is used to working with low resolution. My natural want to work with .gif files as an animator, and the higher potential for problems in high resolution sprites can really trip up someone who isn't prepared.

Is this actually a problem? No, not at all. With prodigious use of an alpha channel, the first image looks clean and reads beautifully. When I attempt to convert it to a .gif file, problems abound. To avoid this issue with a 'halo' (an issue I think a lot of us have seen with non-alpha sprites) or worse, the team at Lucasarts for Monkey Island used a technique to solidify the edge of the sprites by giving them a one-pixel-wide black outline:



I believe Igor uses the same technique in Ignac (another hi-res AGS venture that I'd love to see in action again). It works like a charm, and looks great in-game. There are various methods to avoid having hi-res sprites reading badly in a lower-resolution environment, so from the pure standpoint of a sprite as being something that can be used in a game, I suppose that there really is no issue with any of the high-res sprites that we see. Now, where was I going with this?

Basically, the question is, how well-adjusted is AGS to the hi-res scene? And are we really equipped to make adventure games in hi-res? I certainly believe that it's possible - a sprite is a sprite is a sprite, but how can we apply ourselves as a community in the creation of 'current generation' graphics... Or at least graphics that fit a little better with the times, as it were.

I'd like especially to invite the members of the community who have successfully completed and released high resolution projects (Ali, Le Woltaire, etc) to educate us on their techniques in smoothly integrating high resolution graphics in their games. I believe that any insight that the rest of the community can gain from your triumphs would be a great asset and help us all learn a lot.

Low Resolution
Now, I've spent quite a bit of time on high resolution. Let's talk a little about low-res. This is a lot more my speed, I think. As primarily a pixel artist, of course, I'm going to be biased about the usefulness and ease of working with low-resolution sprites. I've been doing low-res since I started doing pixel art for a failed team project competition with Geoffkhan, Cameron, Rui and Custard a number of years back. One of the main draws of low-resolution sprites in my mind is the ease of animation. With a tool geared towards that very task, like GraphicsGale (Linked above), animation becomes a piece of cake. In my current project, I'm regularly making in-game character animations of up to 100 frames per loop (Thank you, CJ, for taking the limit off of frames per loop). I can cut a lot of corners by copy/pasting certain parts of a frame, and only making minor pixel adjustments which would (and I may be misinformed), in my mind, require complete redraws of each individual hi-res sprite per frame to achieve the same amount of fluidity.

Is low-res more convenient for our purposes? I'd like to make note that there really don't seem to be all that many games that really fit the bill - most of the high resolution adventure games out there jumped straight to 3D. With the exception of a few games like CMI, there are actually very few games of any genre that I can find that make use of hand-drawn 2D graphics. This leads me to question, why not? It's not like there weren't a few years where this was considered cutting-edge; so was it a matter of 3D just being there at the same time and easier to create lots of various animations without having to redraw frames?

I know of course that it's impossible to discount all of the animation that has been done since the dawn of time which was all hand-drawn and looks just marvelous, but those (with a few exceptions) were done by a whole studio of artists, and took a damned long time to do, in general terms, and also weren't used in adventure gaems. How does the hi-res crowd compensate for this? Of course, nobody ever said that an AGS game has to be animation-heavy, but I'm a real sucker for a lot of fluid movement (Limey Lizard is a great example of what I think visually you can really accomplish with a motivated animator in an indie project, even in a very short period of time).

For the members of the community interested in working in high-resolution, does hi-res make animation more difficult? Or is it just a difference in approach? As a low-res artist, I do all of my work on a digital medium. I actually don't take a traditional approach to sprite development almost at all - I start and finish all on the digital format, at the sprite level (no concept drawings - or if there are, they generally aren't used as part of the final product).

As an independent game development community, how well-equipped are we to develop a full hi-res game? I've seen plenty of concept art coming out of our hi-res members, but most of the actual product leans very heavily to the low-res spectrum. Someone mentioned during the debate I linked at the top of this thread that the tendency towards low resolution in AGS is because we're generally focused on the adventure games of the '90s. I wouldn't say that's incorrect, but at the same time, I am willing to bet that a number of us would be more than happy to develop or play a game done in high resolution like CMI or Toonstruck, though it seems a bit inaccessible.

What are everyone else's thoughts about the differences between high and low resolution?