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You have probably already thought about this, but since animation usually is quite a big part of adventure games, you should take this aspect into the equation as well imo. - What works best from a workload / your animation skills -point of view.

Looking forward to them.

@EliasFrost: The tutorial links are surely helpful, but the game tips; 8 bit Zelda and Elves? I'm sorry guys but those games don't provide very much help with either shading or light. 

Sorry for being a pundit but, with the exception of Hotline Miami, none of these games are really top-down Dreamweb style. They use a pretty-high-down perspective, which I don't believe is what Jack asked for.
It seems that very few decent looking games have been made using straight top-down perspective.
I suppose the old Alien breed games would qualify but there is not much interesting shading going on there...

Nice looking little demo with a fun little puzzle.
I'm not sure if it's relevant at this point, but the book gui seems to have a lower z-value than the bookshelf. I.e. when right clicking at the book (inv object) in bookshelf view, Ord says "Let's take a look." but the book never shows up.

Looking forward to the full version.

And we all love you for it.
So, to sum up: Small games are actually doable atm?
Did DiPerla create a template or something? Or would you have to hire a programmer anyway? - Old forum threads are "open ended", so to speak.

I think someone, maybe Joseph DiPerla(?), was making android stand-alones by wrapping games with a modded version of the launcher. Not sure how it turned out though. Would this be a way to go?

Two ways to understand the question, Armageddon:

Q1) If you run the game fullscreen (as most games are set to by default), it fills the screen regardless, so why upscale?
A) Not all computers/screens can set 320x200/240 resolutions, and even if they do the results aren't always great (the graphics either appear blurry or just in a small part of the screen). By turning on one of the upscaling filters in AGS, you get better compatibility. (3x and 4x might look even better depending on your screen.)

Q2) Why does Wadjet Eye do that thing (in some of the Blackwell games, at least) where the graphics are pre-scaled, so the game is actually running in a higher resolution than it looks even without an upscaling filter?
A) Mainly to be able to display text in higher resolution, I believe. Plus, the oldest Blackwell game(s) are from before AGS supported filters. I agree that it's an odd choice. (Interestingly, the beta version of Resonance did the same thing, but not the final version.)

Thanks. I guess I meant both.
Are there any other reasons for using upscaled graphics instead of filters, other than the ones mentioned? - If you don't want high res text, and things like that.

@monkey: Thanks for explaining things (although, most of us knows the basics of what curly braces do ). The part about defining variables inside/outside braces was news to me. Hat off.

@CW: Does this mean that I found my very own ags bug? Or at least a flaw?

Oh. I probably used braces too, but I'm afraid I deleted the original code.
The example was written here, not copy-pasted, so there may have been a few misses. Sorry.
But I still don't understand why the first example fails and not the other.

Thanks Khris! It works nicely.
But I don't get why it worked in my second example...

I am trying to use pointers to simplify some of my code. Problem is that I suck at it.

This is what I had in mind, only with a lot more "else if" blocks. However, it returns an "Undefined token" error:

Code: ags

function room_RepExec()
{
 if(oObject2.Visible==true)Object *nextobject = oObject3;
 else if(oObject1.Visible==true)Object *nextobject = oObject2;
 else Object *nextobject = oObject1;

 if( -various conditions- ){
    nextobject.Graphic = 1;
    nextobject.SetPosition( 1, 2);
 }
 else if( -other conditions- ){
    nextobject.Graphic = 2;
    nextobject.SetPosition( 3, 4);
 }
}

The code below got it working. But it kind of makes the whole thing rather pointless:

Code: ags

function room_RepExec()
{
 if( -various conditions- ){
    if(oObject2.Visible==true)Object *nextobject = oObject3;
    else if(oObject1.Visible==true)Object *nextobject = oObject2;
    else Object *nextobject = oObject1;
    nextobject.Graphic = 1;
    nextobject.SetPosition( 1, 2);
 }
 else if( -other conditions- ){
    if(oObject2.Visible==true)Object *nextobject = oObject3;
    else if(oObject1.Visible==true)Object *nextobject = oObject2;
    else Object *nextobject = oObject1;
    nextobject.Graphic = 2;
    nextobject.SetPosition( 3, 4);
 }
}

I also tried putting the pointer code in a seaparate function and failed.
What am I doing wrong?

Resonance was 320x240 scaled up to 640x480. Primordia was 320x200 scaled up to 640x400.

Possibly stupid question (it's pretty late over here), but why upscale? What are the benefits?

Thank you folks.
It seems that this is as dark as it gets without turning invisible for some people.

I think it's a little too bright now, you don't get that scary feeling of what's in the shadows, maybe add another color that's darker blue around the edges of the room.

I don't quite follow you there. Darker blue? The darkest colour has an RGB value of 2,6,9 right now. Could you please clarify...

Don't apologize for helping out. I was the one who asked for help in the first place.
Actually, I was seriously thinking of going EGA. I mean, having graphics that people can't see, feels a bit pointless.
Going with Cat's suggestions would basically mean reworking the whole thing from null, so I am not doing that no matter how good the points are. Besides, this tread is not about improving composition, but rather making the damn thing visible. (Of course, I will take the things pointed out with me to improve other work, further on. So thanks people!)
The monkey island background thing I was going on about was just to illustrate that a high contrast needs some sort of gradients to not look like tv-static, at least on my screen. -I hope that grammar made sense.

But back to the main issue: Was there any improvement at all in the last version? (there was one brighter tone added to all essential bits.)

But the edit I did didn't remove the black base. It is still there! It shouldn't appear washed out or grey, because it is not.

No, no, I was talking about my own failed attempts looking gray. Not yours.

About House of Mojo: My initial ambition was to keep colour count fairly low. If I want to use colours with the same brightness levels as that screenshot, then I would have to go for a more cartoony (EGA monkey island) style. I'm counting 88 colours in that shot, 18 in the blue area around the kettle alone. My piece is currently using (and struggling with) 10 colours in all.

One of the problems I'm having with brighter colours and higher contrast is consistency with the rest of the game. I already made a couple of semi-dark outdoor scenes with ridiculously low contrast (unfortunately), and wanted to make this indoor one look darker and more claustrophobic. It seems that every edit I do takes it further away from that mood. Maybe EGA is not such a bad idea after all.
Anyway. New attempt with a brighter floor/ceiling/detail -colour:
(You will have to take my word for it if you can't see it.)   
[imgzoom]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/42681740/snow_ship_b_contr%2Bb_bc.png[/imgzoom]

Thanks guys. You are very kind.
I do realize what the problem is here, but not how to fix it without reworking everything from scratch. The level-tweaked version in babars post looks (yet again) ok in 1x and maybe 2x zoom but is not really readable in any larger format. The art is simply not good enough to do that. It might get a little better if I reworked the floor and ceiling and added another colour to soften things up, but I'm skeptical.
However, I partially disagree with both of you about literal darkness (well, not entirely). The screens from monkey island are both moon lit outdoor scenes, especially the graveyard, which makes a comparison difficult. This is an indoor scene which is what I am attempting. -Literal black everywhere. Ok, my scene is not aiming for this cartoony look at all but without a dark base, everything goes very gray for me.

@Anian: I knew your level-tweak was not a proper edit, but I didn't know what else to call it. 

Is there any way of in-game checking which driver is being used?
It would simplify some of the d3d adaptation of older code.

[imgzoom]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/42681740/snow_ship_b_contr%2Bb_bb.png[/imgzoom]
Sorry for not respoonding until now. I have been experimenting with the palette and come up with this as being the brightest scheme I can use without getting all of the issues I had with Anians edit.
It is however, still pretty dark. Probably too dark for babars screen. The default gamma slider will be in there though, so it should have some degree of flexibility.

Babar: Could I abuse your kindness and ask you to try out the gamma settings, if I sent you an .exe?

Ah. Thanks for clarifying.

Note: You may need to put some of those dll files in a system directory too, I can't quite remember. To quote Danilo, "I just copied those files everywhere and it worked."

Would this mean that anyone using the finished exe also has to install dll files everywhere?