Messages

Alrighty, everyone - only 8 hours left in the competition, so if there are any last-minute entries, now'd be the time to post 'em. I'd be willing to extend the deadline a touch, if anyone requests it, but otherwise you've got until the clock strikes midnight on the international dateline.

One thing I noticed about this background that may stand to be mentioned is that with the exception of your couch and the front of the desk, your lines are straight. Though it'll significantly increase your poly count and make rendering take a while longer, you might want to look into some curving - lines that are nice and straight, though they don't take away from the overall cartoony ambience, seem a bit sterile. Your mundane objects are all warped, which looks great, but you may want to take it one step further, and add just a little bit of Bill Bryson style curve to the art.

For reference:

Note how all of the lines have subtle curves. (Screenshot borrowed from World of Monkey Island.)

I've been looking at some other 'cartoony' 3D rendered games (MI4, Sam & Max 2), and they don't really use this technique very much either, so I can't predict how it'll look ultimately, but I think it could benefit you in the long run insofar as adding a little more 'cartoony' flavor to the images. Might be worth a try, at least.

There we go. My entry into the jam.

Faerie, reclining.

Actually, considering it's a fallen angel, that should be unholy.

I'm going to attempt an entry as well.

My rapidly receding hairline suggests I'm not the young pirate I once was.


SpacePirateCaine: I'm an arrtist.

[The sprite!]

Ahoy once again ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Animation competition. The rules are simple, but here they are are in case you forgot.

• A sprite is supplied, with a theme.
• Participants must use the given sprite for their animation.
• Each competition will last 11 days.
• The starter of each competition will decide on the winner.

The winner, who will decide on the next competition's theme, must also supply a sprite.

And now: The sprite![/i]


Isn't it cute?

I have no idea what this little guy's supposed to be, either. It seems to have turned out to be some kind of bird... thing... To be honest, I made the sprite in about three minutes. But it's up to you, my intrepid animators, to show me what it is, and what it does in its natural environment.

So go forth! And animate!

[Edit:]

Awesome competition, everyone - And nice Rockman edit, Tocsik - It was fun to do some animation again after so long!
Looks like I'm up to the plate. I'll get right on that. Thanks for your support, all!

Edit: Looks like it was a close run between Coolio and I.

It's been Friday for a good 12 hours in Japan, but I celebrated turkey-day by going to KFC and getting myself a twister last night after work. I forget the holiday almost every year since I've moved here, both Canadian and American, so I was determined to do something even if it was kind of lonesome and more effigy than anything. Chicken for turkey, teriyaki sauce for cranberry... But yes. It was still thanksgiving, and I'm thankful for that.

As for things I'm honestly thankful for - The support of my friends and family, although I abandoned them and left for another country, unable to see them on holidays such as this; the friendship and companionship of a wonderful woman, (coincidentally 10 months to the day as well) though she may be away until the end of the month; a job I can tolerate that puts food on my... desk... and the consistency of the planet, which keeps on spinning at the same speed, in the same orbit around the sun, in the same manner that allows me to survive from day to day.

Happy thanksgiving to all you Americans, and happy labor day to the Japanese (Which was consequentially also yesterday). And happy November 23rd to the rest of the world, or whatever this day signifies to you.

Wow, thanks for the positive input, guys. I missed these forums. Just wish I could be here more often. All these entries crack me up.
I really like how everyone else managed to fit in the rest of the props - I thought about using the chest, but couldn't handle it.
Buloght! Your spriting skills, yo. I can animate, but you can create! I wanna see you in here showing the rest of us up.

Well, the timing was right -- I had two days off, my girlfriend's in another country, and my roommates both had to work, so today was an animating day.
x2x1
Hope y'all like it. Arr.

I will take this opportunity to announce my triumphant return to the AGS community (if anybody noticed I left) on this mobile thread.

I have returned! Fear me.

I'm still a lazy bastard, and now that I work full-time as a language instructor, I have little-to-no time to actually work on anything, but Rui convinced me to come back and just interact from time-to-time. And so I shall.

Arr.

If I may, I think the 'common trade language' route is really the way to go. It's the easiest method to allow people of different cultures to communicate without having to design something that would become a very large and percievably superfluous part of gameplay. This is the route that Sierra took for "Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire", as well as the 3rd and 5th games in the series, in which only select few people could speak the same language as you did - mostly traders. Granted as you spent the entire game (I'll keep to 2 in my analogy) in Shapier and Rasier, respectively, the number of people who could speak the hero's language was rather large, but it wouldn't be strange (or perhaps it would be more appropriate, all things considered) to have only a select few speak the character's language. It's my impression of the old QFG games that this was little more than a way to make it so that they didn't have to program in a method of interacting with every single background character they had walking around as 'filler', but it really added an element of realism, when most of the characters just said something in a foreign language and went on with their business.

So people who needed to be able to trade would learn a trade language, much like it works in current society, and those who had no business with outsiders would not. The only drawback of this method, of course, would be that you'd have to work out a pretty decent reason why some characters are able to speak the language when logic would dictate that they shouldn't be able to.

I think that having a rather sturdy language barrier in-game would be an interesting twist in gameplay, honestly. And it keeps things relatively simple as far as 'how to set up interaction with tertiary characters in-game'.

I like it - it has a very groovy, classic top-down action-rpg look to it. Sort of along the zelda bent. I'd suggest, if I might, to also design a tiling pattern for your trees, using the same parts, so that you can easily fit many together. And lots of other debris, of course. It's a great start, and I'm interested in seeing where it is you plan on taking this.

One thing that does come to mind, is your character has a very well-defined black border, while the tree doesn't. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it does distinguish your character from their surroundings, but for consistency, you may want to alter either the character sprite, or the outer edge of certain elements.

If I may be so bold:


It might behoove you to darken some of the outer pixels on her loose-socks, as they don't show up very well on lighter backgrounds. (Noticed after making the background transparent).

I made some very minor alterations to frames 2 and 4, which I think help to make the movement transition a little more smoothly - making the swing of the tie less drastic, and also changing the hair's movement (also less drastic) and added some swing to the hands. I also altered the skirt ever-so-slightly in frame 1.

The more drastic movements do help to distinguish movement, and are pretty groovy stylistically, so this may not appeal.

It looks pretty good, and the skirt seems fine, in length, to me - one thing you may want to keep in mind, though, is that if she's furyou, she's more likely to wear a long skirt (assuming this is based in Japan). If she's just an ass-kicking high-school girl, then the rolled-up skirt works fine, methinks.

The link you're looking for isn't actually "www.removed.com" - that means that the link has been removed by a moderator, because it leads to abandonware links, which are discouraged on the forums. (That's what the last sentence there means. That was written by Mr. Colossal)

If you're looking for that particular game, you're going to have to look elsewhere, I'm afraid. And besides, Sam & Max isn't abandonware at all. I wish it were, but it falls entirely and unabashedly under the 'warez' category ( which we don't condone at all here... You know, it being illegal and all), because LucasArts still hold an iron grip on their products.

Now, let's see if I can't say something at least vaguely relevant to the thread...

There are a lot of LucasArts games out there that I never got the chance to play, Day of the Tentacle included, back when they were available. Now that I'm an adult, and have money to spend on video games like that, it's damned near impossible to find anything on the shelves. I kick myself often for not picking up those old Adventure Packs that LucasArts had released a while back.

Of course, those Adventure Packs are a very valid reason why they aren't releasing their games as abandonware - and if the game companies are actually doing something, like updating old software to run on more recent machines, I'm all for it. I'm going to be very glad when the Sierra 'Quest series' collections come out. I lost my 15th anniversary edition of Space Quest somewhere, so that's one thing I'm going to be very eager to replace.

One thing I think is odd about abandonware, though, is that I've noticed that I have a lot less patience to play games through when I haven't paid for them. Maybe my attention span was just cut bitterly short after I turned 20, but I've noticed that when I can get something that easily, I don't feel nearly as motivated to really put any large amount of effort into finishing. And the games I do want to play through often don't work well on my computer. DosBox is a wonderful program, but a bit buggy on this ol' clunker of a laptop.

Still, the most handy thing I've found about abandonware is that I can replace games I rightfully own but can't play, like the Wizardry series - I had five through seven (And still have the manual), but lost the floppies for Bane of the Cosmic Forge ages ago. I have a CD-ROM of 7, but couldn't get it to actually install. Now I'm playing through Crusaders of the Dark Savant again, and (though realizing how sparse the game world really is) enjoying it at least a bit.

Fun, at least for nostalgic purposes.

Realized I probably haven't said anything in this wordy post that hasn't already been mentioned, but oh well.

Yeah, Japanese girls tend to become a bit bow-legged and pigeon-toed because of the necessity in Japan to sit in 'Seiza' (Sitting on your calves, essentially, with knees in the front) as often as they do in school (During school assemblies, many formal sports and the like). This leads to the bow-legged look.

Kinoko - your assession of Japanese schoolgirls amuse me to no end, mostly 'cause it's so true. Also, just for reference if you're going to be making a game that has a good number of students in school uniform, that's a summer outfit; so the boys will be wearing white polo shirts and navy slacks, and you may also consider having a few of the girls wearing their gym pants underneath their skirts; the 'bad' girls, ironically, seem to be the only ones who exercise this particular form of modesty.

As far as hair is concerned, even that slight brown is still too much for the Japanese school system. As Kinoko said, in Japan students are required to have black hair unless they're foreign or in a foreign school. So I'd bring it down to a very dark gray, and give it light gray, or bluish highlights. That is, of course, if you're going for some form of realism. As you can see in most Japanese cartoons, this doesn't stop them from coloring their characters' hairs any way they feel like.

Good to see the caption contest back again.


Sorry, Farlander.

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[Gonna Make You Happy Tonight]

For those having trouble with hearing the lyrics:

Gonna Make You Happy Tonight

Baby, gonna make you happy tonight...oh sugar
Gonna make you happy tonight
Give my love to you, oh, baby, gonna make you feel so right...oooh sugar
Gonna make you make you happy
Spend some time with you, do the things you want me to
Gonna make love,Gonna make some sweet sweet love, sugar
So get ready, Oh get ready get ready
Ready for loving tonight, Baby

Before we get down to love, Before we get down
I just gotta finish this level
I got a high score tonight
I just gotta save my game
I'll be with you in a minute sweet baby
I love how you dance for me
(But could you) move a little to the left baby
I can't see the TV

Baby I can't wait till we start, oooh
It's just that the save points are so far apart...in this game baby
But I do love you

Baby this bit's got multiplayer
Maybe you can operate a turret with me baby, would you like that?
It's good cause games give you hand eye coordination
And spacial intelligence together with map reading skills
Ahhh, sugar

Turn the lights down low, Lower, lower
Turn the lights down low, Just a little bit lower
Turn the lights down low
It's just that it helps me feel like I'm in a spaceship

Then we can make some
Sweet sweet love honey, Sugar, Baby
Ooo you look so great to me, baby
Have you brushed your teeth yet?
Take your time, No hurry
It's just that I'm not tired. Are you tired?
I'll see you in the bed then
You might want to take a book

Oooh, you so fine baby
Doo doo doo doo
I can't stop thinking about you...and all the coins I have to collect
I just gotta find one secret area
Get one more ability point
And I'll make sweet love to you baby

I think this xbox
Is the best present I ever bought for you...
Baby

(Shamelessly copied from the Tripod website)

Alright, that's more like it. I copied a good number of ideas from Helm's edit, which hopefully worked out alright. I'm also in process of reading through the links and the advice in your post, Helm, which is greatly appreciated. I'll attempt to apply the things I learned in future sprites. This isn't yet a finished work, of course. I also have to give a swing at the flower shirt. I'll see if I can't apply what I've learned into that to start. Wish me luck!