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I like your background better. I wouldn't change it to be more like the other one.

The thick black outlines in the "soon" picture is from using the pen tool in photoshop with a brush of about 5px, I think. If you use Photoshop then you can just outline over the top of your image. If you use another program you might have to find a tutorial for the specific program.

Same with the blur. That's just a Gaussian blur applied to individual layers. (Filters>Blur>Gaussian)

Hope that helps

I especially love the dreads - you've almost got me reconsidering her hairstyle! 

It tickles me to imagine a bubbly Harijuku chick bouncing around, talking in extremely fast Japanese, pausing every so often to say "Jah! W'appan? Ev'tin arie?"

As for some of the other comments: I don't have any formal art training, so I made this sprite by tracing over a model to get her basic shape (a la Kakfa's Koffee tutorial), picked the colors off another sprite, and drew the uniform on her using my references. It's amazing what you can accomplish doing this, but I wish I could say there was a little more creativity/originality behind it. But maybe someday I'll be able to draw something like this from scratch .... 

No, this is the best way to learn! Besides, it's more or less the same as drawing something yourself. You still have to paint over it, so I think thats where the originality is.

As for her skirt, well, I lived in Japan for 2 years, and they do get pretty short. It can make riding an escalator quite an experience. But, I'm going more for sexy than obscene (although I guess that's eventually the viewer's decision), so ... I guess I'll lower it a bit ... grudgingly.

The obscene thing was actually an oblique song reference. I am a card-carrying member of the short skirt fanclub.

Reminds me of when I first showed my wife GTO. She was horrified at the escalators in the first episode...

Like if  Fairuza Balk and Juilia Roberts had a kid and inherited both their mouths...

Alynn thy name is FEAR

Also for the second part  of Theephs post, you must now animate them kicking, Rockette style

Profuse apoligies for the O/T but I just have to:



Be obscene! Be be obscene!

Actually so as this isn't a complete off topic post...

EagerMind - it's pretty obvious (from the fact that you said you've been around on the forums for a while) that you've been skilling up on sprite drawing, because this is pretty darn polished for a first post.

My question is why the weird pixel ratio? It seems to be based off multiples of 3. I think this is why you had issues with drawing the mouth too wide. If it was multiples of 2 or 4 it would have been easier to do, IMHO. Not that it matters of course. Just curious.

Welcome to the boards! (Well, ya know. In a registered capacity)

Heh... how to improve? Make a music video of version 1 kissing version 2 in the rain behind a chainlink fence whilst onlookers watch. You'll make millions. Oh wait no that's been done.

Actually, on a serious note, it looks great. Here's a *really* quick suggestion for the head. Just an idea, and you're probably better off waiting for someone more talented to reply, hehe.



EDIT: Oh hell why not:

Ok. Wen't a bit nuts, but that's what happens when you've got your own stuff you're supposed to be animating and you just happen to be looking for an excuse not to do it heh.

and in case anyone wonders, hod (not a hod) is a concept from kabbalah, with the picture above actually showing a tree of life (sephiroth) with hod marked in white, something I know from Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Woot. That's how I knew about it too. Great show. Great avatar. Read "Foucolt's pendulum" by Umberto Eco for more kabbalah schtuff, kinda Gabriel Knightish.

Great quiz SV! Dock and Turf! Argh! I went though a zillion iterations of totally different words than those. Curses!

What is it good for?

Heh, I was singing that for *hours* after playing this, and thought about suggesting it as a theme song but... meh.



On topic - I'm gonna try the new ver =) looking forward to it

Wow Aku, that's really impressive.

My thoughts:

I think that the controls are too hard for the flyers - how aim and fly-in-a-direction are the same. It feels quite authentic and I remember retro games where I'd do that, but I think it's too much of a gameplay sacrifice.

I also found the player sprites to be a bit big for the bg, or the bg to be too small. I don't know if you've ever seen Soldat, or even Doukutsu but they both allow for a whole bunch of action on screen whilst looking pretty and being low-res. Although given that the gfx are just temporary, I can see this might not be an issue.

Finally, I think a popup-modal dropdown menu would be really good for changing character and weapon types in game. And just have it greyed out during turns etc. or choosable before the first shot is fired. Just a thought.


Anyway, I found it quite fun and blasted away for a while. With some sound and graphics it's gonna rock. Well done and keep going!

Cool. Thanks Drawken!

It's gonna be really helpful to have an itemised list of stuff to fix/implement. Thanks for the compliment too. I shall have a bash at the changes and see what I can come up with.

I also just noticed how revoltingly inconsistant the leg shadows are too. >_< *headdesk*

Thanks again!

Oh, and it amused (and complimented) me to know that somewhere, halfway around the world, you were trying the walk out! I'm glad you didn't try the walk from my first version... I might have had to pay for damages.

Cheers.

Welcome r4l. Looking forward to this game.

Btw about names how about Vincent, Rick, Derek. They're kinda dead hard. Especially Rick. I can count about 6 film noir movies I have with Rick as a main character.

EDIT2: Also, does anyone know how I can get more fonts? Not AGS fonts, but Truefonts. Im looking in particular for the Ransom font, but my computer does not seem to have it.

http://www.1001freefonts.com/

Under "R" they have a ransom font.

Also try Blambot, which is linked off above site. Happy hunting.

Huff puff.

Ok some big changes. Anyway I pretty much painted over Ben304's edit. I rearranged things a bit, but not too major. Changed the trouser colour... lets the shading show up better which makes the legs look better I think. Taking a short break from this one now to go make guis

Hi. Your idea sounds cool and I loved 7DAS too.

My crit:

Voyageur is actually spelt "Voyager". Unless of course you mean it as the French word Voyageur meaning "traveller". If this is the case you should change EFSS to VSFT (vaisseau spatial de fédération de la terre), otherwise it might just look mispelled. Or include some backstory to dodge this. Anyway, just sayin.

The weapon - I think one of the scariest things about 7DAS was that you're on board a big ship with loads of tech, but you're being hunted by some crazy guy with a massive knife. It might be hard for you to get him to terrorise with a shotgun, because it's kind of immediate. Loud bang = dead. Might be worth investigating other things that the crazy guy would use. He's from another dimension so a double barrelled shotgun might be a bit banal.

What about some sort of wild extradimensional sword that can cut through anything? Or if you want to use a gun, how about a funky looking handgun that hurts like hell but needs two or three shots to kill someone, so they can complain before they die? Just a thought.

As for your art, I like the room and I'll get to it but first a tip - I'm pretty sure you shouldn't post it with such a huge black space. And also it's in jpeg which, due to compression, messes up your nice crisp image and makes it hard to edit.

Anyway, here's a quick repaint of your room. I'm pretty sure I left your drawing as it was (I like it). I just changed the colours to give it a more 'gritty' feel. It should still be under 256 colours - I hope you're not using a pallete less than that. If so then ignore

If you're using ms paint, you can define your own colours by double clicking on a colour you don't use and redefining what colour that is (I think. Haven't used it in a while).



x2



Hope this is helpful! Keep it up

Just... wow. Thanks a bucket load Ben304! I think I'm slowly getting it.

Comparing our two anims, I'm thinking that the top of mine looks like it's running a marathon and the bottom is doing some crazy moonwalk. I'd like to say it's because I want that effect, but I'm pretty sure it's a whole bunch of little lazies that squished together into one big squishy ball of mashed potato... of laziness.

It's gotta be said though... I heart your ugly-stick-face drawing. It's gigglesome.

Thank you so much for investing all this time... O_O it's really cool.

I'm going to go play with your final frames and spend some time getting it working. Stay tuned.
Also - yeah it's about time I changed the jeans colours. It was frustrating me when I was making corrections because I couldn't see what I was doing without adjusting my monitor contrast. Blast!

Cheers!

A treadmill. Now that's an awesome idea.

Unfortunatley, I don't own one and also we suffer the same ailment, that is - laziness.

Anyway, departed from excercise equipment I rocked out with my pixels out and here's the latest version:

*Fixed walk cycle to correspond to Ben304's stuff-that-makes-sense. *bows*
*Added cooler looking hair flick. The old stuff was too limp. Hopefully the new stuff isn't too extreme.
*Busted out my force equals mass times acceleration squared, and made boobies go up and down only.




Edit: Also for fun and giggles, here's a sample of a flip thing I'm working on. It was a five minute job to pixel because I drew it first. That's basically what sold me on it.

Go the lake module, it's awesome.

But you said 20x20 tiles. Do you mean like a top down rpg?

Anyway, it seems a bit of a waste if that's the case, so if it is just have all the walkable areas around water hotspotted to change the tiles for the shoreline to ones that refelct the main char and annimate them manually yourself.

That's what I reckon anyways.

Wow.

First thanks to Haddas for the rotoscoping tip. Having a little trouble doing it to the sashay because of the zoom factor. (Ie. chick walking towards me gets bigger but sprite needs to stay the same.) However I am totally using that technique for some of the other animations I've got hidden away for her and others. ^_^

A huge thanks to Ben304 for the amazingly helpful walking tute and crit. That is going to be wildly useful. I'm gonna take some time to animate the walk properly now. I've been playing around swapping torso and legs and getting some ok results so with your ideas I should be able to come up with something I'm happy with. *gives you the internet*

Anyway, here's another char I've been working on to stop myself from burning out trying to get Amy to get her walk on.



Ok. Off to scribble some pencil versions of those new footsteps. A huge thank you to everyone once again. This is really helpful.

I don't know if this is in keeping with your style, or even good, but I jotted a few ideas here:

*Added gradient to outside, and cloud.
*Made low opacity light layer to appear like streaming in light from outside
*Added crazy cereal box and doohickey on clock for chuckles.

Hope this was useful

Hi.

So not one to give advice ^^; but you mentioned the ribbon.

I thought if it was gauzy type stuff it might catch the wind a bit more so...



Anyway.

LOL n3tgraph.

There is no way I'm trying to emulate that walk myself. Although on the amusing side, I just asked my wife to, and she bounced a coke can off the back of my head. XD

But will try reducing sway and increasing the up-down. Gotcha.