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~esque (Suffix): Similar to the noun preceding it.

So Falloutesque means "In a similar bent to that of Fallout"

The abundance of colors in the sprite here make it somewhat difficult to animate efficiently. Granted, they look pretty nice, but with dithering and so many extra shades of gray to deal with, redrawing something at a separate angle is something of a chore, so I kept everything level. Ideally I'd take what you had already and have the gun angled slightly down at frames 4 and 8. As is, I've only added a little 'physics' to the movement. At present, you've managed to fix by and large the bounce of his step. Obviously when you step down, especially when you're walking with something heavy but also in general, you tend to put extra weight on the feet which causes your whole body to move downward. However you're still not making use of all of Newton's first law of motion - Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

What I'm talking about is: That gun is big. It's big and very far out in front of our hero here. Even if he has some massive strength, it's very likely that downward motion (caused by stepping down) and the law of gravity are gonna try their damndest to bring that gun to the floor. Now this means that he's going to be wanting to heave it back up into position to keep it forward. This will cause a slight 'afterbounce', if you will, to the gun.

Like so:


Technically, this should also apply to his MDK hat, but I'm just trying to make a quick point. It's a sloppy edit, so I hope you at least get the gist of what I'm saying. Hope this was helpful!

[Post Apocalyptic]

I'll admit, I'm a huge fan of the Fallout games. It's been ages since I actually played either, but I was pretty excited to hear that Fallout 3 is being developed. All thoughts about how well Bethesda will do at recreating such a successful franchise aside, it's pretty exciting, I think. It wasn't just that the story was great, and the game played so well, but it was the setting: Post apocalyptic Earth. So to coincide with the release of the first Fallout 3 trailer (Tomorrow, as of this writing), I've decided that this time around, I'd like to go with the theme:

Post Apocalyptic

I want you to pixel me up a sprite of a character that would fit well in a Fallout-esque post apocalyptic setting. So give me something appropriately dusty and dark-futuresque to enjoy, so that even if Fallout disappoints, as so many people seem to be assuming it will, there'll be something to cushion the blow.

And now for the boring technical rules:

Sprites may be up to 150x150 pixels
You may use up to 32 colors

For inspiration: The official Fallout 3 website.

Enjoy!

Thanks, MoodyBlues, I did my best - I'll be honest, I was planning on making him a shadow elemental, but as soon as I started with the wispy curls of smoke and so on, I figured I'd taken it too far, and he needed to be renamed. Glad you liked him. It was a fun, and tight competition, to be sure. I've got to take a page from your book, and give people a sprite competition they'll be able to run with.

On a linguistic note - considering the subject material of the character, I would've assumed you'd have interpreted the element, 空(Kuu) as 'Void', instead of heaven.

Well, let's see. I took the liberty of doing a quick paint-over of your bouncer to illustrate a few of the points I intend to make, so here it is (Double size, for ease of viewing):


Now, essentially, I kept the same palette you had (though I did edit the skin color a touch for contrast), but pushed a few pixels around to create a more directional light source. The biggest issue I saw with him is that he looks like he's wearing kevlar body armor with his muscles shaded in that manner. I know it does lead to a very 'Mr. Universe' character, but you can imply large muscles without being overly blatant through outlines, and making the pectorals a major spot where the light and dark switch.

As a general rule, I give most characters outlines using a single pixel width line of the darkest (or at least a darker) hue. It's not a necessity, but it helps define some of the edges a little bit better, I find. Otherwise, I use the different colors to define certain parts of the body, like knees, biceps, wrinkles or details of clothing, and so on. I would almost even suggest adding another shade to his jeans for even more definition, but they work without doing so, if you're budgeting colors.

Speaking of which, You've used a lot of low-contrast colors in his face. When I got in pretty close, I really noticed how much there actually were. You can usually do as much detail as needed with three or four shades.

In order to make him look a bit less like a soldier from DOOM, I added some wrinkles here and there to give it a more cloth-ish appearance. With his pecs the way they were originally, the positioning of his arms was not really that far off base, but I thought it'd be better if his stance was a little more relaxed and natural, so I brought his arms in a bit. His hips/crotch were a bit lower than I thought they should be as well, so I hiked them up a tad, and re-contoured parts of the legs to imply the thighs and calves a little better.

Now, I won't even pretend I'm the best here when it comes to shading. This here is all stuff I learned from picking apart a sprite or two that others here, like Helm, showed me, but I hope it helps a little bit.

Otherwise, I gave him a slight widow's peak, and put some writing on his shirt, just for fun.

I just realized that today was the cutoff date, so I threw together an entry.


Nightmare Elemental

There were way too many acronyms in that post to make sense out of easily. And I also noticed a distinct lack of punctuation and proper capitalization. Far be it from me to wear the badge of the grammar police, but that post was extremely hard to wade through, Wtcq. Now, to bring this topic back to where I assume it was meant to be leading, the MMO (Or Massive Multiplayer Online) genre has taken a pretty strong foothold in peoples' daily gaming, because it offers an aspect that other genres don't - the ability to play in a world populated not by computer-generated NPCs, but by other people.

Now, this can lead to problems as well. I've always found that the MMO experience is usually very 'sullied', you might say, due to the fact that I'm surrounded by other people. If I want to play a 'role playing game', I assume that I'm going to be assuming some sort of 'role' beyond that of 'the guy who plays the night elf rogue'. Unfortunately, interaction with other people tends to be that of an 'out of character' nature. RP-based games, and even "RP only" servers on MMOs usually even only manage to keep up the facade to a certain extent.

I personally don't like to play MMOs because I never can get immersed enough in the plot to enjoy them. I hear a lot of people trying to convince me that you can take an 'active role' and 'follow the storyline', but when all is said and done, the game only moves forward when the programmers move it forward - until then, the entire point of the game is to advance your character to the maximum possible level the game allows, then group with other maxed-out characters in order to fight against extremely difficult enemies, ad nauseum. It's become much more streamlined, and I applaud the effort put into these quests by the games' developers (I did spend a good bit of time playing World of Warcraft a year ago), but ultimately the problem with them is that they lack an ultimate goal.

My biggest complaint with MMO games is the very thing that they'll never be able to overcome - the fact that there's no way to win the game. If you become the highest level, explore every inch of the map and defeat every enemy there is to defeat, the game just continues to go on, because it is necessary for the game to accomodate all players. There's really no way to finish the game, and hell - if you could actually finish in a MMO, you'd probably stop playing, and the developers would slowly lose revenue. Hence, the biggest gripe I have about them is their very raison d'etre.

Now, I beg to differ about the thought that MMOs don't contain adventure elements. As I'd said before, they do have a fair attempt, depending on the game, at a cohesive plot, and there're no small number of puzzles you have to work out. It's granted that the puzzles themselves are much easier to work out than, say, a puzzle in The Dig, or even The Longest Journey for that matter, but aside from the fact that the way they are forced to deliver a good number of puzzles is limited, they still have just as many 'adventure' elements as they generally do 'real time strategy' or 'role playing' (a misnomer in and of itself).

I don't honestly think that the game world is leading to exclusively console and MMO games - it's very likely that the largest portion of gaming is going to be leaning in those directions, but there'll always be a market for single-player games on the PC, I think. At some point, people are bound to want the simplicity of an adventure game or platformer, which doesn't involve spawn points or 'mobs'.

And on the topic of cost - if you don't want to pay money for an MMO, play one that doesn't have a monthly fee, like Guild Wars.

About a year ago, I had the distinctly interesting experience of working professionally in the gaming industry. I spent two and a half months as a "Quality Assurance Analyst" for Konami Digital Entertainment. That translates to "Game tester", essentially. I would spend eight hours every day sitting down at a desk with a TV, VCR, PS2, XBOX, Nintendo DS and PSP, and 'play' a game ad nauseum, walking against walls, trying to jump out of the level, and so on in order to make the game as bug free as possible. It was far from being a hugely important role -  I was hardly a key figure in the creation of this product, but I did my part. However, one thing that happens with being a tester in a big company is that you aren't always working on something good.

There have been many, many worse games in the world than Xiaolin Showdown, but there are just so many games that were better. For a number of reasons, some more overt than others, this game was slated by the media, recieving an average of 4.5 (bolstered only by the fact that for some reason, one site gave it a 7) and has made it onto the do-not-buy list of more than one game review page.

Now, is it necessarily wrong that I feel a strange sense of vindication from seeing a project I was intimately involved in completely lambasted? I was among the first to admit that the game was un-good - it was a featureless clone of better games, was blander than burnt toast, the ending is essentially non-existent and above all, you can't possibly lose. But despite all of these things, I am faced with a dilemma: My name - my real name - is in the credits. When people play and become very, very disappointed that they even possibly shelled out the paltry sum it costs to rent a video game in the western world, my name will show up - even if completely ignored. I am involved with something so very awful that I, one of the very few people who should be proud to have their hands in it, am oppositely satisfied with the fact that nearly everybody who's played it disliked it.

I think this stems partly from the fact that during the making of the game, I fought long and hard against the game's developers themselves to make the game something I actually wanted to see. The hard-headed game designers at Bottle Rocket entertainment refused to listen to the earnest cries of the testing team to fix the glaring issues with gameplay, fun factor, and everything else. And thusly, when the game was released in November, everyone else played it, and it was summarily torn apart like so many extras in zombie movies by (nearly) every reviewing site online.

So I pose my question: Has anyone else here been involved with something intimately, that they were glad to see fail? Any sort of project that they had only enough power to do what they could to make it that much less bad, and otherwise just watch the train plow into the side of the apartment building?

I stand happily corrected. I'll admit, I like the fact that there are more sales outside of the community - the logic is certainly sound, and I'll also admit that it was mostly hypothesis, so it's good to know that I was wrong. Now, that does, I'm sure, lead to some semi-unfounded feelings of guilt from community members who are essentially taking and not giving, but such is the nature of a producing community. I'd like to rely on outside consumers to pay my bills, as opposed from hand-outs from people I know.

I approve of what Andail said - reputation is a very important thing to think about. AGS is a vastly varied community, and the level of quality ranges from Rich Phycho to Amazing, which means that you can only expect that you'll see all of the above (and most likely a lot of the prior) most of the time. I personally have very little faith in my own ability to produce something of the level of quality that should be expected in a commercial product - and this is why I don't imagine I'm ever going to sell my work. By and large, everything AGS that has had a price tag so far has been of the quality to expect that price tag to be respected - and in my opinion, the bar needs to be raised for the products to be taken seriously.

I like that the major share of available releases here are freeware - it means that I have plenty to play without needing to use up my own money to do so. Five dollars isn't very much in the grand scheme of things, especially for hours of work on a labor of (hopefully more) love (than anything else), but I'm still reluctant to pay with so much free available to me. What do I want to pay for? Something I know I'll get the money's worth from. That's why I like demos - I know that if I play the demo once, quit in the middle and never play to the end, I probably won't want to spend the money. If I get all the way to the end of a demo and want to see what's still to come, I'll be much more ready to shell out for it. I have heard some people say they don't like releasing demos (though I'm hard-pressed to find good examples), but in my humble opinion, it's imperative (for me at the very least) to let me taste the ice cream before I buy a cone.

I honestly don't know exactly where I've been going with this post - It's near five in the morning, so it's very possible some comprehensibility has been lost. To sum up, I understand how I was wrong - that's pretty groovy - and the logic is pretty sound, on a second mulling-over.

Didn't actually see the movie, but I had enough kids come into the store, and also read enough of the cards that I got the idea. I'd be interested in seeing it now, actually, if only to get a feel for how they actually play up the 'revolution against humanity' aspect. I did most of my research through google so far, though.

[The Evolution of Beatboxing, Part 1: Fluteboxing]

I've been recently pretty interested in the many facets of beatboxing - I know a lot of people dislike beatboxing, or don't seem to find it impressive, but I think it's some great stuff. I was inspired by the Nouvelle Star beatboxing link that Nikolas posted. I even did some 'blogging' about it a few months ago on MOG.com. I'll spare the personal reviews here and just send you in the direction of the individual blog pages:

The Evolution of Beatboxing, Part 1: Fluteboxing
Additional Fluteboxing link that's been posted since that article: Live at Union Square

The Evolution of Beatboxing, Part 2: The Roots

The composition isn't bad - you've got plenty in the room to keep the player interested and looking around - it reminds me vaguely of certain parts of Quest for Glory, which I assume is the look we are going for. I'm a fan of foreground elements, which you have in abundance, and the colors are mixed well as to not disorient the player or make it in any way difficult to look at.

One of the major issues I can see is in how a lot of the image is very grainy. I'm not sure if that's just a problem with compression, or if it's intentional (in which case, disregard that), but it's somewhat noticeable, which means that as a viewer, I find myself staring at empty space looking at speckles that don't seem like they should be there. If you're working in a limited pallette, like 256 colors (granted, many Sierra titles of the day did so as well), this is less of an issue, as it's hard to avoid.

Now, as many are likely to point out, another issue with the picture is perspective. A lot of stuff doesn't really follow linear perspective, so I would suggest first making sure that all parallel lines (like that of your rugs) merge at a common vanishing point. The biggest issue that the perspective brings up in this case is it confuses the eye as to what sort of angle to expect. I see the purple and blue rug in the back, and it suggests a somewhat subtle incline, whereas the top of the barrel, being wide top-to-bottom, or the blue and greenish rug in the lower right tip up, suggesting a more top-down visual angle.

As a purely aesthetic thing, I would say that you should probably leave the candle flames as animated sprites in-game, as opposed to being rendered as part of the background. You can keep the shading of the room itself the same, but if you have existing fire and spheres of 'glow', then it takes away the opportunity for some nice 'living' background elements when you implement them in-game. Also, on the subject of lighting, you might want to play with shading things using your two candles and (to a lesser extent) your stove as light sources. It would make the room seem a lot more dynamic.

Overall, it's a great effort. I hope that some of this advice helps make it even better.

About seven years ago, I used to work in a toy shop that specialized in imported goods from Japan, though could only really push little more than a metric assload of pokemon cards. I found myself needing to memorize pokemon and what they do in order to pitch the cards to the (rare to begin with) customers that would come into the store, as the few collectors that came into the shop for the interesting merchandise were few and far between.

While doing this research, I always found pokemon to be an interesting concept insofar as it essentially glorifies slavery and gladiatorial combat, doesn't it? It's like cockfights for children. I mean, think about it - there are legions of children and 'teams' who go out into the wilderness, beat the living hell out of and subsequentially trap and enslave once-wild animals in order to send them into combat against other peoples/teams' creatures in battles for fun and profit.

If a fighter has a ringer of their own, they trade their weaker gladiators to other people in order to profit them a little better. In all of this, the creatures are generally resigned to their fate, and unable to do much of anything aside from wait in their 3x3x3 inch plastic ball until summoned forth to fight - or die while doing enough damage to soften up an enemy before the better fighters finish it off.

When you think of the Pokemon movie, it even makes it a little scarier to think about, as the entire plot revolves around a creature that was bred to be a great fighter, but doesn't want to live only to kill its bretheren for the entertainment of humans. So this revolutionary (Mew 2) revolts and tries to fight against the pocket monsters' tormentors for their freedom. Of course, in the story this character is shown as the bad guy.

Telling this to my students the other day, I was told "You have no dreams, do you?".

Cute little scamps.

I was a little worried people wouldn't get it without the captions, but I guess people recognize a cell phone when they see one now-a-days. Glad you liked it. It was a toughie getting it to fit reasonably in the picture without standing out like a sore thumb.

To comment on the previous comment regarding cellphone games - the reason that people are more willing to shell out cash for their cell games is this: It's difficult to get a game on your cellphone without doing so. There is an overabundance of computer games. The market is essentially saturated, so if you want a computer game, it's very likely that you'll be able to find one that's free that also is as good as a fair number of commercial games. People are becoming less and less inclined to pay for a product when the alternative is so much less costly.

Now, this isn't to say that cell phone games are impossible to get for free - it's possible to program a cell phone game and upload it to your phone through a data transfer wire (or at least that seems to be the case here in Japan, but the actual rate of free cell games to pay games is astronomically low. Once cell games become more accessible - which is to say, when people figure out how to get cell games without paying one way or another, the sales of cell games will drop.

Another thing that cell games have going for them is that they're portable. It's not to say that I can't take my laptop with me to work and open it up to play an AGS game during my lunch break, but the cell phone is a lot more convenient because it fits in my shirt pocket, not to mention that it's less conspicuous. So I'm more likely to pay for a game on a cell phone in order to have something I can play while I'm sitting on the train, or waiting for a friend. That's the charm of portable game systems. I bought a Nintendo DS instead of a console, for example, because the DS I can play anywhere, but the console is anchored to my house, for all intents and purposes.

Now, as far as selling games is concerned, there has been no shortage of conversation on the topic, but what I believe it boils down to is that a game will do well depending on its demographic. You're likely to make most of your sales of AGS games within the AGS community, I imagine because we're slightly more willing to pay a little extra for a game in order to 'support the community'. I'm still planning on buying copies of 'The Shivah' and 'The Blackwell Legacy', once I've got a little extra space on the ol' credit card, though it's entirely possible that they'll remain largely unplayed (not because I don't enjoy them, but because I don't have time to play games at home so much anymore).

For what it's worth, dkh, I'm fairly certain I would've given that first place, too. Looks great - kinda reminds me of a Starcraft building or something along those lines. The detail is awesome, and for some reason, I love those barrels. Sorry that you didn't make it on time, I really dig it.

[radiowaves]

Alrighty, the cutoff date has come and gone, so it's time to announce our winner!

I'll begin with a brief comment on each:

radiowaves: That's one hell of a sprite you've done there. Upon close-ish inspection, it does indeed seem to be isometric, and the attention to detail is commendable. Is "inky." a pseudonym? I'd love to see some more of your art.

Sinsin: Following the rules of isometric art to a fault, almost. The picture itself is pretty interesting, though as you said yourself, some details seem to have been lost. I'd like to see this picture finished before I really give it a heavy critique.

MoodyBlues: I'm afraid I've never seen Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, but from the title, it sounds like a movie I'd want to see. That aside, I like the sprite quite a bit. It follows the rules of isometric art very well, and has a lot of character. It also sort of reminds me of Kamen Rider, for some reason.

The turnout to this competition was small, but I'm pretty satisfied with what we've seen. Granted, the theme was a lot more open, apparently, than many would often seem to prefer, but such is life, I suppose. This week, I'd like to award the prize to MoodyBlues for her adorable if depressed-looking Pia Zadora. Great work, MoodyBlues! I'll see you in the next competition.

SpacePirateCaine's home-made Chicken masala curry (easy version).

You'll need:
Sliced boneless chicken, about 250g
1 large onion
3 cloves garlic
Garam Masala
Cayenne Pepper
Curry Powder
1 can concentrated tomato soup (I use campbell's Healthy Request Tomato Soup)
Cooking oil

Optional:
Ginger (grated)
Brown Sugar

Preparation:
Start by chopping or dicing the onion finely, and crush the garlic (If you don't have a garlic crusher, finely chop the cloves, then crush with a fork), and put aside.
Also, in a small shallow bowl or custard cup, mix your Garam Masala, Cayenne Pepper and Curry Powder at a ratio of roughly 1/1/2 with a little water to make a spicy paste.

Instructions:
Heat olive oil in a large frying pan on medium to low heat, and add the diced onions. When the onions become translucent, add the crushed garlic (and, if desired, grated garlic) and cook for about one minute. Add the chicken, and cook until the chicken is no longer visibly raw. Add curry paste (The more of it you use, the spicier the mix will get, I recommend about three tablespoons) and stir until everything has a fine coat of red paste. Allow to heat for another minute or so, then pour on the concentrated tomato soup. Stir so that everything is well mixed together, and turn heat up to medium-high, until the soup begins to bubble. Add brown sugar as desired for sweetness (and to counter-balance, if it's too hot). Heat while stirring to allow extra reduction, then serve when its texture is to your liking with buttered Nan.

I think, like everyone else, that if you're going to have a superhero called fatman, he should really be grotesquely obese - otherwise it's lacking in the real shock value I think it should have. Now, I would find it pretty entertaining if that yellow utility belt was holding in some of his flab at the beginning of the game, exploded and left him the enormous version of himself in the left image, assuming you're looking to use some visual/slapstick sort of comedy (I know that I, being a big dude myself, use the ol' "tighten the belt to appear slightly thinner" technique).

I do think the bum-chin looks good, or something that isn't quite as zig-zaggy on his face. However, I'd like to see some talking animation to know for sure. But that does remind me - if he's fat, shouldn't he have a double chin (at least)?