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I wish I could say I'd be able to recreate that without studying your work extensively, Helm. I'm going to open that up in GraphicsGale, cry for a while, and then see if I can come even close to the same level as that.

As far as the anatomy is concerned, yes, it's hardly photo-accurate, but it's the way I've drawn for quite a while. Somewhat more cartoonish than many, more realistic than some. I do admit that I'm still a rank novice when it comes to working out pallettes, and I've been quietly picking apart your work on PixelJoint to see if I can't figure out exactly how you do it.

Unfortunately, I fear that I'm still nowhere near being able to whip up something that good in the amount of time that I'm sure it takes you. I hope that when I'll also be able to animate it (when I get there) without too much trouble. I'll get on fiddling with that a bit. All things considered, I'd love to just take that and claim it as my own, but I wouldn't learn a thing from that. Any pointers you could offer me (and anyone else reading this) that we may be able to work with, save for going over your work with a fine toothed comb? Anything you could teach me would be greatly appreciated.

Also, regarding the left foot, I try to work with the feet being more flat to the ground, so they work on a broader range of backgrounds, but I have no proof that the feet that Helm reworked wouldn't do just as well or better. I'll try some stuff out, and see what works best.

Thank you so much for your input.

Funny, that - I was actually having trouble coming up with an appropriately good line in that frame. Being the only real speech in the comic, it's really important, too.

I was originally going to have a few more frames, where the caddie said, essentially, "It's three in the afternoon, we're on the sixth hole of eighteen and we've been here since dawn. I'm tired, hungry and you make me wear these stupid damned caddie pants every time we come here. I'm going home" Or something along those lines, but I thought that was just a little too agro for the comic, and would've dragged it on longer than it needed to. I like your rewrite of the line.

Not even sure if that's a shot, a drive, a putt or what. I don't know the first thing about golf. Oh well, it was fun to draw, and I loved the other entries in the contest as well. Took me a moment to figure out Neil's as well, but it was definitely well executed.

Awesome. Congratulations, Mr. Ben! It was a fun contest - not a whole lot of new entries after the initial spurt, but there were definitely a reasonable number, and they were all pretty groovy. I was particularly fond of Vict0r's, personally - says a lot in very few words, so to speak.

Looking forward to the next competiton!

Also a very good point. I also just noticed Zyndicate's edit, and gave another whack at the legs. Dragged them a little closer together, and slimmed them down a bit. He's supposed to be athletic, but not an olympic speed skater. Thanks a lot for the input, everyone, I'm really glad I put it up here.

Thanks for the prompt input! I went ahead and tweaked the length of his right leg, and updated the files, so they should be now visible in the first post, sans long-leg.

Ahoy.

I've been working on redoing a bunch of the sprites for a revived game project I am involved in, and figured that if I was going to put the effort into a complete rework of in-game graphics, that I should do it right.


This is the lead character sprite (3/4 view), with and without hawaiian shirt, and I'm attempting to make it look good, while keeping a relatively low pallate and keeping it easily animatable. Wondering if I could get any tips on how to make it look even better, and perhaps optimize the image a little more.

The game itself will be 640x480 resolution, and though we're going to be using a high-color pallate, I still like to work in the range of 15-20 colors per sprite, if I can.

I may, in the future, be posting more sprites from the project, so I'll just keep this thread for that purpose.

This has to have been one of the best sprite jams I've participated in to date. Lots of really tight competition, and just a great theme with a lot of imagination from all ends. I know I had a blast - I'd also love to see a game that involves these not-so-superheroes.

Congratulations to Mr. Frisby - I was giggling at that one, too. You're a weird guy, and I like it. Definitely looking forward to entering your competition.

I was drawing examples from projects in the past/things that are currently being made to bring relevance to my argument. I totally agreeing that creating ones work from scratch is the best way to learn all sorts of new things, but having something to work from already is a good method of understanding how they were created. That's why in art classes, people are taught at the beginning to use reference photographs and so on - it's a good idea to build up  a solid base of skills and learn from others' accomplishments and mistakes, as opposed to going it entirely on your own.

Now, by that same token, I think that the recreation of existing games should probably be exclusively used as a learning tool - a stepping stone to creating something much better(?) using your own imagination, and the skills that you acquired through the study of previous works. If I ever decided to get my feet wet in AGS scripting, I'd probably start by trying to recreate certain effects from things I already liked and thought I could benefit from knowing how to do.

That's, I figure, what the original purpose of demo quest is. The big difference between recreations/remixes and fangames, of course, is whether you're taking a concept and adapting it, or taking a concept and recreating it. Adaptation can theoretically be good if you're not just throwing everything you don't like out the window and changing it around until it's hardly recognizable, but there's a lot of temptation to take things in a direction that was probably never intended by the original creator - and that's when one should probably ask themselves if they really want to make a fangame, or just a game with the pull of recognizable characters.

Lo-res-man: Pre-, or post-mortem? It could work, if you had a really good concept for it. But it'd be just as easy, and much less limiting to make a completely different headless undead pirate the lead of your story... Sure, people may realize it's inspired by Bob, but you wouldn't have to deal with all of the slack you'll likely get for not being completely true to the MI series.

As far as most fan games go, I'm not a big fan of them usually. A lot of people start writing their games, obviously with good intentions, but don't do nearly enough research ahead of time. They seem for the most part to just be thinking "I' d really like to see guybrush do this!", paying no attention to whether that'd be even remotely feasable for the characters in the first place.

Even when I'm a hundred per cent certain that I know the plot and characters of a series inside-out, I can rarely see an actual good way to create a decent fan-game without actually consulting with the original creators. That, I believe, is a reason why so many people seemed to hate Curse of/Escape from Monkey Island, even if they had their blessing to go forth and make the game. Fan games, of course, have the benefit of being viewed as fan games, and have a lot less expected of them. But I generally think that if you're going to go through all of the effort to make a game, then an original one is better.

Now, with that said, I'm actually quite impressed and interested with the idea of 'Herman Toothrot's Monkey Island'. He was a character in the game that was unexplored enough, and there's enough unexplained puzzles involving the things he did on the island before Guybrush arrived that it could actually be a really good fangame if delivered properly. If you're going to make a fangame, that's the sort of game you'd want to explore making: One with enough potential to be original without having to worry about conflicting with the personalities of main characters and events in-game. The cannibals, their lawyer, LeChuck's minions and Herman Toothrot are just broad enough characters that it could work.

As far as making essentially complete remakes, without improvements, I don't see it as a bad thing necessarily - it functions more as a test of one's skill, however, than their creative ability (Granted, it would seem there's a lot of creativity involved in making a decent script in AGS, but I know nothing of that, being effectively illiterate when it comes to scripting). An example of this working well is Rui Pires' "Leisure Suit Larry II Point & Click". It removed the necessity of the text parser, which helps make it more accessible to people with dubious spelling abilities, or the impatience to actually type in every possible verb-noun combination they can think of.

Text Parser games often did have the problem of requiring guesswork, to 'figure out exactly what verb the creator intended you to write'. When it's a more visual interface, like sierra's more ambiguous verb icons, you (Although relinquishing a degree of control) are able to progress a bit quicker in-game. So, depending on what you're actually doing, it doesn't seem like a real bad idea in my eyes. Of course, I would like to repeat myself in saying that if you're going to bother, why not do something original?

(Whee, I replaced my keyboard, so I'm back to writing long-winded replies to forum topics that very few people are actually going to read all the way through!)

That is a good point. I don't refer to myself as a DJ either, though I've never actually done any Disc Jockeying myself - Can barely work a pair of turntables properly, and create all of my music digitally, so don't really think I am entitled to the title anyway. If it isn't Dan's work, I'd definitely like to know the track names/composers that are featured in these sets.

I wasn't sure exactly whether he meant that he'd composed the music himself or not. A jealous and sore-loser part of me is hoping he didn't, but I've heard a number of digital music composers refer to themselves as DJs in the past, so I assumed as much. It also stands to reason that it would be his music since he didn't mention names of other artists, and is offering it for free download here.

I also don't recognize any of it - though that's not saying much, since I mostly listen to the commercial dance music he's referring to.

This is indeed some pretty groovy stuff. I'm listening to it as I type, but so far I'm enjoying what I'm hearing. I'm a big fan of ambient dance music like this. I may even venture to burn it to CD to listen to while driving.

I wasn't so sure at first about the track during the intro, but once it got into the first actual track, I was hooked. How long did it take you to compose all of this? I'm working on a set, myself, but it's taking me ages to get anything really decent. Yet another composer on the boards to make me feel inadequate as a musician.

I think it works rather well as your own personal style of art - unfortunately, people are going to draw similarities to a specific genre of art no matter what you do; it's just hard to be completely original when most facets of art have already been explored. I'm not sure exactly why you're trying to distance yourself from 'manga'. I suppose you're talking about the Dragon Ball/Sailor Moon stuff. I'm not going to get into a big explanation about how that's a bit of a misnomer, as there's a whole lot of variation of art even in Japanese comics (manga).

But I digress. If you don't want people coming up with similarities between your work and the work of the more popularly imported Japanese stuff, you'll want to work a lot more detail into your pictures and be very exact, or very loose with your anatomical proportions, while avoiding the simplifications that you find in Japanese comic art - I find that a lot of attention in noses, for some reason (as Hillbilly also pointed out), can push you more towards a western style. The child in the running position at the top of your page has the closest to what I think people are talking about, largely due to the way you drew the nose (mostly undrawn, with a few well-placed curves to suggest it) and eyes (also simplified, lower lid completely undrawn).

As your proportions are concerned, I find that most comics in Japan are actually generally very anatomically correct, at least as height and body-type are concerned (This is, of course, a generalization, as there are plenty of exceptions to the rule on all shores, such as the work of Tezuka Osamu and Toriyama Akira in Japan, or Albert Uderzo and Chuck Jones of the western world.

Basically, I think you should just stick with drawing things the way you're comfortable, and don't give a damn about what people think it looks like. You drew it, so it's your art, no matter what it may or may not be influenced by.

Happy birthday wishes to our good friend who left the forums so unexpectedly just recently, Rui Pires. May he one day return to the forums and grace us with his wisdom and presence again.

Meet Emo!
1x:2x:

Pouring his soul out into his music regularly caused Harold Charleston's actual immortal soul to partially separate from his body, and it now floats a few inches off his left shoulder.

It doesn't really give him any particular superpowers, but the constant tormented wailing of his soul is really creepy and makes it hard for people in the vicinity to concentrate.

It's been a long time since I entered one of these.

Hope y'all liked that.

I'm looking forward to going back to the US for the two weeks I have off between school, seeing my family and my cats, and sleeping on my own soft bed. Looking forward to spending my free time teaching myself to cook Indian food and seeing old friends.

I'm not, however, looking forward to the time I'm going to have to spend writing my senior thesis and two other reports, doing research and so on when I should be relaxing.

I always thought it took one to spam and 20 bring it to a second page.

I've always been a fan of the Rogue class hero of the Quest for Glory series. He had a lot of personality for someone who never speaks. For some reason I always tried to play a paladin, but played like a thief. I guess it's easier to identify with a character who you could just give a personality to.

I also liked Cutthroat Bill from CMI, and April Ryan from TLJ.

Almost looks to me like a transcript of a conversation with a HAL program - often they are pretty damned tough to decipher. That, or someone was relying on a translation program to get their point across, 'coz they don't speak English.

For a month or two a few years ago, I recieved sporadic messages from someone I'd never met before in English not entirely unlike that one. I attempted to carry on conversations (Because I had nothing better to do at the time), but apparently the person on the other end (If it wasn't some sort of weird internet chatbot) seemed to have no clue what I was talking about either. It was like having a conversation with someone who suffers from Wernicke Aphasia.

I suggest just deleting the e-mail, running a virus scan (just in case) and getting on with your life. Now, if you get more mails from Ms. Titor, it might be worth looking into.