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8 colors, including transparency.

I'm not really that satisfied with this - I might edit the sprite a bit later on.
4:10am: Pushed a few pixels, added facial hair.

Awesome work, everyone. I'm kinda glad I didn't do Leonardo, as I'd originally planned, actually. And extra big props to ProgZmax for the D&D Cartoon sprites - I nearly forgot that terrible show even existed. Nostalgia rocks. Bring on the next one, Mordy!

I decided to go a lot lower than the maximum size allowance. Kevin here's 50x50 and 12 colors.


The game master

Speaking of your animation team, Chapter11, I still have yet to hear back from you about that position you offered to me. It's been a few months, so I essentially figured you'd given up on having me as a part of your team, but my offer stands if you're still interested in my assistance.

Even if you aren't, I'm really looking forward to the finished product - it's looking pretty damned awesome.

Thank you for pointing out that flaw in my argument, CJ. Let me clarify my point: Teaching as a profession - the skill required - is not difficult, but it is taxing. When I taught little kids who were hyperactive and didn't want to listen, it was often very hard. It's 'hard work' insofar as there is a lot of issues regarding managing the kids you teach. I won't disregard that particular difficulty - but as you pointed out, the difficulty stems from luck of the draw. The profession in general, however, only requires that a teacher has the skill to instruct others in a general field of skill. To teach high school math, you need a knowledge of the mathematical concepts that you will be teaching. Granted most math teachers will understand much more deep concepts than the average layman will, but the fact remains that these are concepts that you learn in high school, so aside from general teaching courses, a math teacher only needs to know what they learned in high school.

This is going to sound very condescending, and I apologize to anyone offended by this. I have the utmost respect for teachers, and as I said before, I was one for a long time. I did my degree in Linguistics, and became a language teacher. It was a lot of work, and I don't want to belittle anyone's hard work, but I'm making an objective statement about the general value of learned and acquired skills.

All work is 'hard' in its own way, but some jobs' difficulty stems not from the personal ability of the person, but outside factors. That's why physical labor doesn't pay well - it's not something that has to be learned over a long period of time. To put it in a vulgar sense, "anyone can do it". The people who end up getting paid more are the people who show skill in a specific field within their job. People who can lead, manage, plan or have shown particular dedication and efficiency in their job. People receive higher pay to compensate for the relative rarity and perceived value of their skill. That's why you will make more in the IT field, CJ, than a high school teacher is likely to. I don't think it's "right", I'd rather teach than do what I'm doing now. But I'm trying not to make it a personal thing.

Like some of the others who have contributed to the thread, I was a teacher until very recently as well. I think I was very much in the same boat as Vince Twelve is now, as he lives and teaches in the same country as I do, though mine was a private sector language school, which very recently has gone down 'the tubes' as it were. Due in no part to the fact that Nova (My previous company) was falling apart faster than Xebes at the end of Metroid, I changed my job and began working a month and a week ago as an IT Executive search and recruitment consultant (Or head-hunter, if you like).

Basically, I turned to head hunting because I'm planning my future, and as much as I loved teaching, in order to bring back to Japan and support my girlfriend, who lives full-time in Korea, there is a fair bit of money necessary in that transaction. The Base salary at my company is 280,000 yen a month - modest, and generally paying better already than a teaching job - but the commissions are where the big money comes from. For every candidate I place into a client company, my company receives 30% of their first year's projected on-target earnings, as a signing bonus. I pick up 30% of that. Coupled with milestone bonuses, I'm looking at anywhere between 6.2 and 9.6 million yen a year.

The flipside of this, of course, is that head-hunting is soul-destroyingly hard work. If anyone's taken a moment to think "Where's SPC disappeared to?", it's the trenches of head hunting that did me in. I work on average 11-hour days, filled with cold-calling, sourcing, candidate meetings and resume-writing. It's one of the most aggressive and cut-throat sales markets out there, and I've never worked so hard in my life.

The point of it all is, in order to make that money, I have to work damned hard. Teaching isn't hard work, as far as I can remember, and I did it for 6 years. In my experience, and humble opinion, money is directly proportionate to how hard you have to work to reach your targets, or how rare your skills are. My position has also given me some very deep insight into the supply and demand, as it were, of IT professionals. The perceived worth of engineers, versus salesmen, versus marketers or administration - the skills that make someone worth a lot of money.

Put quite simply, people don't prefer to give a lot of money to teachers, because they have a more general skillset. That's why a university student can teach math to a high school student. Of course the professional will make more money because they understand teaching theory and have a license to do business, which the freelancer doesn't. Likewise a University professor makes much more than a high school teacher because they are much more specialized, and have a rarer skillset. A university physics professor is to a semiconductor engineer as a high school teacher is to a marketing communications professional.

Hope that made some sense.

Alright, I made an effort to fix my facial structure - opened the gap between the eyes, and made my schnoz a fair bit bigger. Widened the chin a few pixels, allowed my hairline to recede even further and fixed some of the collar on my shirt, as well.



I'm attempting, if possible, to accentuate the 'wild eyes' look. So even if it's not a perfect representation, I like them that way.

[Buloght]

Alright, boys and girls, the cutoff date has come and gone - and therefore, it's time to announce the winner: I'd like to give everyone feedback, but sadly I'm between a trip to the regional immigration office and going to work, so this needs to be kept brief.

First, I'd like to say that this was a great contest - everyone had some awesome stuff to submit, and I'd love to see entire scenes at some point, but as usual, somebody needs to be the winner. I think nobody will dispute that Buloght's deathwing is technically and artistically awesome. And for that reason, I'm gonna give him the win for this competition.

I'd like to thank all participants for entering, and I'm looking forward to competing with you all in the next jam.

Arr!

Thanks a whole lot, guys. The advice is certainly welcome. I'll take a closer look at those two edits, and see what I can do to improve the piece I've already got. There are a good number of changes that need to be made, it would seem, so I'll do what I can to fix it up and post the results here later on.

Cheers!

Arright, so I'm trying to improve on my pixelling skills, and I've done just about everything I can to finish this piece. It started out as just a 60x60 avatar (Seen on left), but today, since I had some free time, and was bored out of my mind in the evening of my birthday (Go me!), I thought I'd try and expand upon it.

I'm attempting to keep the pallette to 10 colors (11 if you include transparency), but still keep it as realistic as possible. I'm quite proud with it as it is, but I know that there's always a lot more that can be done to make something look good. I'm trying to avoid dithering, except perhaps in places where it'd look natural (Like on my stubbly cheeks and chin). Just wondering if anyone can give me any pointers on how to make it look even better? Should I expand the light areas a bit? Maybe do some dithering? I kind of suspect that I'm not using at least one of these colors to the full extent of its usefulness.

This is the sprite:


Based on this photograph I took of myself.

I could tweak it 'til the cows come home, and every little tweak has been an improvement (in my own humble opinion), but I'm willing to bet some of you could put this to shame. So please, help me improve myself. Thanks!

Why not? I'd be willing to lend my voice to the game as well, if anyone's interested. How do you plan on holding auditions?

[Rethinking style]

Okay, as per usual, I've been procrastinating on starting a new topic due to a rather distinct lack of inspiration. I'm always flattered when someone chooses my work over all the other great and worthy entries, but it does mean that I'm shouldering the responsibility of thinking up a topic, typing it out eventually, and ultimately judging the subsequent competition. I'd almost rather leave it to one of the other winners, that way I could enter again (since really, the most fun part is actually making the sprites). But enough rambling from me, I have a sprite jam to host, and it's already late.

Anyway, this week's jam's theme is: Rethinking style

What would The Curse of Monkey Island have been like if guybrush was still done in the same style as Secret of..., or LeChuck's Revenge? What would The Longest Journey have been like in EGA? What I'd like you to do is take an existing game character and re-think them in a different graphical style (Preferably a commercial game, but independent is fine, if you provide a link to a screenshot displaying the original graphical style). To provide an example, some people have recreated the original Maniac Mansion characters in a vaguely Day of the Tentacle style, on a (now locked, consequentially) thread in the Critic's Lounge. This is an example of what I'm thinking of. By no means am I going to say you should be doing anything in any specific style - I'm even going to say that if someone thinks they want to do Sam & Max as a realistic Dog & Rabbit, instead of the Purcell style, that's their prerogative. So both graphical and/or stylistic re-imaginings are welcome - I'll leave that decision up to you, I just want to see characters as they could have been in another graphical style.

As far as technical limits go, I don't want to put too many limits on what you can do, but I do want you to stay within the limits of the graphical style you choose. Which means that if you're doing an EGA style character, I want to see a sprite that would've fit in a standard resolution for the era. Use common sense.

Good luck, my children.

Go, and play!

Arr. 5 Colors, and a picture for reference.

SpacePirateCaine is sporting this Summer's newest light armor fashion - an upper body plasteel vest, with the Blue Cup Pixel Gunner Logo emblazoned on the central buckle. Under that, he sports a light weave, waterproof Gore-Tex lined canvas jumpsuit and steel-toed boots. In his hands, he carries the PDDC-552 Pixel Rifle and its portable back-mounted power source and data processing unit. The rifle is capable of digitizing an enemy at high speed, due to the high energy output, and from a safe distance, due to its superior range. The recharge time is significant, however, so Caine carries a conventional ballistic sidearm in a thigh holster.

I'm working on an entry at present, as well.

The one extremely warped perspective picture in Curse of Monkey Island (I assume you're referring to the lighthouse) limited its walkable area to a section of the picture that still followed - by and large - the established 'playable angle'. It appeared warped and distorted, but they compensated by having very limited movement. You'll probably find that a room with this level of distortion in its potentially walkable area will be very difficult to control scaling and make the character sprite fit. You have a few solutions to this problem, if you keep the room in this fashion. You could, as in the aforementioned games, limit the walkable area to only places where the sprite fits, only use it for cutscenes, or draw separate sprites for each individual part of the room so that the character fits.

The reason, I imagine, that Matt Groening kept the original living room design to a very simple one-point perspective most often when it's displayed in the cartoon is so that it would be easy to animate characters and reuse frames when absolutely necessary.

That said, the picture does look great as you've designed it. It remains very faithful to the original, and as an individual piece of art, it's marvelous. It just lacks a certain amount of functionality if you intend to implement it in an adventure game.

Chicky's deadline sounds pretty reasonable to me. I'm not sure if I'm gonna be online around the time it rolls by, however, so I'll let someone else handle it. And in the meanwhilst, very well done, everybody! I really dig what you all came up with.

[Space Boy]

Very sorry everyone for not showing up in the last little while. I didn't realize when I'd started the competition that I might not have access to the internet at the beginning of July. What happened was, I flew to Korea (where I am at the moment) for my girlfriend's birthday, and for a little vacation. During that time, I haven't been connected to the web at all. It's been a refreshing few days, but I realize that people were expecting results to the competition, so I'd like to extend my apologies to everyone involved. As far as the winner is concerned, it looks like people have started voting, which I guess can be used as the decider. For what it's worth, my vote goes toward Space Boy both because he's got the retro sci-fi thing down, but it also reminds me of Archie comics of the day as well.

[Banjo Nerd: A Real "At Mast" Virgin Porno]

I'm afraid the heathen Chinese slam-dunk locusts, and "Reason Anus" will have to wait until "Game Anagrams 2", since the day has come and gone. I'd just like to say I'm impressed with the turnout for this competition, and I'm definitely glad I did it. I wish I'd thought of the theme myself, since that would be very awesome, but at the very least, I brought it to the AGS forums, and I'm very happy with the work that went into it.

Of course, with so many entries, I'm finding it very difficult to choose a winner. However, without a winner, there can be no next contest, and I'm already past the date. So I'm gonna stop waffling, and give it to Vince Twelve with:

"Banjo Nerd: A Real "At Mast" Virgin Porno" For the win! Congraturation, Vince:

It would take a lot of soul searching for me to muster up even the slightest inkling of sympathy for these people. If they're planning on aborting the baby without a big handout, they may as well just do it. What they're doing is asking people to pay them to have a child. Sure - I'd like people to pay me to have a baby, who wouldn't? Everybody likes free money, but so long as I'm not financially stable enough (and that's a lot of stability for me) to feel like I'm ready to take care of my own child, I see no diapers or papooses in the near future for me, regardless of how much money is donated in my direction.

I don't even think it amounts up to a moral debate - they should abort the baby if they aren't willing to have it without cash donations to back it and refuse to give it up for adoption if they don't abort. That's evidence enough to me that they don't actually want the baby in the first place, and with that kind of doubt and disinterest in your own baby (and even despite the creation of the website and any number of sob-story tactics, it is disinterest) you shouldn't be bringing a child into the world in the first place. I'm not against abortion, I even support it if that's the right choice for the prospective parents, which in this case, I think it is.

Yeah, very sorry about not getting back to the competition. I ended up scheduling an interview for a job, and was actually pretty busy all last weekend. Not enough time for me to work up an entry. Though I certainly hope the competition hasn't been on hold because of my passing comment.