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Born in Nova Scotia, Canada
Lived my Teen years in/Spend my vacation time in California, USA
Currently living in Chiba, Japan

This is my first BG Blitz entry, entitled: "The Watcher's Lair".
What's more evil-genius than he who watches all?



EDIT: I don't know if anyone else is having trouble seeing it, but for some reason displaying a direct link to my DeviantArt site doesn't seem to work. So I uploaded it to the AGS Users File upload thingamabob.

Well, as far as adding things is concerned, what you're going to hear most is that the walls are somewhat bare, which is an oft-cited problem in backgrounds. I also noticed after some scrutiny that your doors seem a little short, generally, unless the roof is somewhat high-vaulted (Like your first draft of the room) the top of the doorframe ends well above the center line of the room. I would suggest maybe bringing the tops of your doors up a bit, and it's mostly a personal preference, but the cross-shaped dealie in the window looks more like a standing cross (As though you're seeing it through the window over top of the next room) as opposed to part of the windows themselves. using your vanishing point to alter even slightly the perspective of the vertical bar should help that quite a bit. That, and you may want to set it into the window's frame a bit. Also, as it's a window, and the blue sky above seems to denote daytime, you may want to even think about putting a spot of light on the ground as well.



Here's a bit of a paintover that I whipped together to illustrate a few of my points. I noticed that the roof and floor still don't converge at a common Vanishing point, which puts the perspective a little off still, but life goes on. The doors look a bit tall in this, and that may cause some problems ultimately with your sprite needing to be huge to accomodate them, but that's what scaling is for, I s'pose. I didn't bother to work to much on perspective this time around, as I made an observation or two here:



This second image shows the seperate vanishing points for your different perpendicular lines:

1: The carpet
2: The floor
3: The roof/Doorframes.

In order for perspective to seem a little more natural, you'll want to make sure that all of these lines hit one central point. They're not far off, but still could be tweaked a bit.

Evil's "Wide" rework is, indeed, a bit over-wide, but does utilise the entire screen, and works rather well, I think.

I'd have to say I both agree and disagree a bit abou the whole tutorial issue. there are some good fundamental lessons to be learned in just about any field - without having learned about Vanishing point and what-have-you while doing backgrounds, provided that they're somewhat realistic, it's a real pain to get perspective right, the same goes with sprite design.

Following every tutorial you find to the letter without doing the slighest bit of experimentation won't get you very far, but it's best to even just check them out a few to get ideas; build up your artistic background as it were. No matter how good you are at something, there's always more to learn.

On the other hand, I agree with you, Ravey, about working on drawing and redrawing a character until it seems absolutely perfect in your mind; that way you develop your own style, and also through doing so can gain a bit more experience artistically.

As far as programs go, there are no shortage of them available, though depending on the level of detail you're going for, there are a wide variety of programs one could use. Low-res sprites are best done in something that is designed with pixel-for-pixel editing in mind, like Paint, whereas overly detailed, High-res sprites (For the ambitious trying to create the next CMI) can sometimes use the extra kick of Photoshop. Or, if you don't feel like paying an arm and a leg for big-time commercial software like that, there are a good number of free programs listed here.

http://www.agsforums.com/yabb/index.php?topic=5644.0

Good luck!

Unfortunately, Xenogia, your picture isn't displaying. I'd be interested in knowing what a 'temple piercing' looks like.

I personally don't have much of a problem with the whole concept of the "Prince Albert", but I also don't think I'd have the nerve to go through with something of the sort. I almost backed out of getting my tattoo. There just, to me, seem to be a few places that I wouldn't want any sharp things to get that close to; the genitals are one of those places. Nonetheless, if you have the balls to go through with such a thing (pun intended), then go for it.

Body art, ultimately, is up to the person getting it done. I dye my hair and have a tattoo, as well as a pierced ear, but that's what works for me. At the parlor where I got my ink done, I saw the most amazing picture of someone who had gotten their penis made into 'puff the magic dragon'. Very colorful and detailed.

Just as amazing as I'm sure we all anticipated, however I have also run into the same problem with Navy Joe's pocket puzzle. Now and then, while clicking about, the magic wand cursor loses it's yellow aura. When this happens, clicking seems to cause the game to crash, and display the error message that Inkoddi mentioned earlier. Waiting a moment allows the game to catch up and play whatever animation will play, but if you're impatient, or don't notice the loss of aura, the game crashes out. Saving before I started probably would've been a good idea.

The only problem I can see your parallel lines don't converge to a singular vanishing point. The best way to rectify this problem would be to choose one singular point and draw all of your angled lines (Walls, roof, floor, doorframe tops) to converge at exactly that point, thusly:

(converting it to a Gif caused the color to go a little off, but bear with me for a moment)


The red lines all converge at one point (Well, as it's a low-resolution image, the vanishing point is a 4-pixel square, but that's the problem if your wall has an even number of pixels on one side.

As you can see, you're not at all far off, it's the fact that distance from the roof to the floor will require you to make the floor very thin. The roof is pretty tall, but I'm imagining, due to the thinness of the picture itself that that was the kind  of feel you were going for.

Okay, that works just fine then. I'd say there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of practicality for him to be wearing the boots you've given him, but they do look alright, and I doubt most people are going to nit-pick too much about them.

Regardless, if you want him to look more like an american soldier, the best you could likely do is to put him into fatigues (Camouflage), or some combination of beiges, the green/black combination may be a bit flamboyant for a gung-ho army guy.

I think the cheezy grin works just fine. You could easily keep the stockiness of his body and trim a little off of the sides to make him look less rotund and a little more musclebound. I did a quick paintover to demonstrate one or two of these points, though I left your color scheme intact.



Here they are, side by side for comparison. I fiddled about a bit with the shading on his torso to accentuate the lines of his musculature, and also whited out some of the pixels on the edges, as well as smoothing out some of the more boxy edges.

Hey there,

I'd like to throw in my proverbial two cents about these sprites - Firstly, especially without the benefit of sources to work on, they're especially slick. I've always been partial to the bearded Guybrush; however one thing that I had noticed about the sprites is it seems both of their waistlines seem maybe a few pixels too low. It's less noticeable on Snake, but it makes guybrush look like he's been swilling a bit too much grog, if you get my meaning. Try hiking up Mr. Threepwood's belt a bit, and maybe even drop the crotch of his pants a pixel or so.

Also, With the great shading job you've done on the rest of their bodies, pure black boots seem a little flat and undetailed. Just a slight gray spot or two could work wonders. Something seems just a bit off about Guybrush's eye as well, the eyebrow is a bit heavy, being pure black, perhaps.

I think that the big thing that could really be done to improve the original sprite would be to take his left hand out of his pocket (As has been done in most of the paintovers) and just keep his pose relatively relaxed, to show that he is the laid-back soldier-type guy he is. Also, the shading on his hands and arms used to show the split between his fingers, and his forearm muscles seem a bit superfluous at that resolution.

My big question, really, is: You mentioned that he is a soldier, but what sort of a soldier is he? His outfit doesn't do a lot to tell what sort of setting you have him in, which is by no means a bad thing, but depending on the type of character he is supposed to be, there are some things that could be done to improve on the sprite.

I was assuming when you mentioned 'Captain America' that you were talking about his physicality, as opposed to him being some sort of superhero. My thought was that perhaps he's a regular, present day soldier.

Were he to be a regular soldier, I was wondering a bit about the reverse-fold boots he wears. I know it's an odd point to be picky about, but the rest of his outfit works with that 'soldier' identity. If he were a medieval character, however, they'd fit just fine.

Hello there,

My name's Luke Rideout. I've been playing around a bit with AGS since sometime last spring, and have aspirations to one day create an adventure game worth playing. Generally speaking, I'm a cartoonist, and I'm working on developing and eventually publishing a comic book (which, consequentially, is the base for the first AGS game I'm attempting to make). I'm 22, will be 23 in a few days, and I currently live in Chiba, Japan as a University student (Studying linguistics, Arr!), though I was born in Nova Scotia, Canada, and spend my breaks with my parents in California, USA.

I've also been lurking on the forums since I first downloaded AGS, so I hope not to make too many mistakes while posting here. My biggest hope, while posting, is to improve my art technique, as I've noticed that there is an immense amount of artistic talent here. It's really quite overwhelming.

Well, pleased to meet everyone in advance.