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That's a well founded fear :/. Some time ago I was catching up on your and Grundislav's podcast, and the part about people who get too ambitious with their first project, quickly burn out and never finish was scary. Well, at least I've got the jam games now, we'll see what happens with this one. Not giving up on it just yet, but might take a detour to something much smaller first.

Man you can get too ambitious with your 40th project, believe me. Caution is always the key.

This looks so good! Looking forward to it. 

Yo this looks awesome!

This looks so good, even though I fear for any artist who puts this much time into a project! Superb detail in everything, love it.

This looks so good! So much atmosphere. Looking forward to playing this!

Man this looks so good, Arjon. I have a special fondness for TI-83, too!

So sad to lose such a friend and a mentor. I'll never forget our many fine conversations, so many discussions of ideas, plans and goals. You were a great man, my friend. Thanks for everything.

dkh and I (along with Howie Day, who I don't think is an AGS member, but I could be wrong) made For a Brief Flicker! We ran out of time to do what we wanted to, but had a fun time joining in and have discussed making a more complete version. This is my first go at 3D character animation!

Looks cool! The first thing that caught my eye, though, was the horizontal part of the lamp post is really, uncomfortably close to the horizontal line that marks the top of the wall. This is referred to as a "tangent" in art. Putting some more sky between these two horizontal lines would really give the lamp post some more negative space, and help it to stand out much better.

This is a very promising project!!

Fantastic screenshots!

I haven't listened yet but I'd also add ‘why are NPCs always such assholes?' too. Seriously they are always so unhelpful.

I feel this comes back down to the basic idea that that often NPCs aren't really characters present for any real purpose than for either comic relief, to antagonize and build drama in some way, or to be an obstacle of some sort - all of which can lead to characters being unpleasant to deal with.

Yeah, that's basically the issue with the story - the manual promises a somewhat detailed tale, with vaguely interesting characters, and the game itself only delivers the most abridged version of this promise when you play it.

Probably one of my biggest frustrations with Dragon Lore is that they didn't explain enough of the story in the game itself, instead relying on you reading the manual and remembering it. This isn't too uncommon for the period - Legend's Companions of Xanth has a lot of moments which make very little sense unless you've read the accompanying Demons Don't Dream, but it's a shame to see adventure games in which telling the actual story completely in game seems to be something of an afterthought. Other than that, my thoughts basically mirror your own. But yeah, stuff like your issues with opening the inventory point out how clear it is that you're meant to read the manual before playing these games. For interface stuff, though, I usually consider this a thing of the era, rather than a design issue that really needs to be addressed, because I don't see anybody doing this anymore.

But, the thing is, it's a Cryo game, and so going in I basically expected it to be this. I love Cryo's Dune, but every other game of theirs I've played has been disappointing in some way. Commander Blood is at least entertaining in its messiness, and silly enough to make me laugh despite not being either well written or well designed, but the rest are mostly just obtuse and bland and hard to get into. Lost Eden probably gets the closest to Dune for me, but also gets repetitive and the graphics simply aren't as memorable or stylish.

This is fun! I especially like it with the wild physics mode enabled and max opponents. Reminds me of playing Death Rally and 240 Racing as a kid, nice work.

Fantastic! Great little demo, really enjoyed it. Great work!

If you're keen on using Photoshop trickery, have you considered using photo textures over scenes and then reducing colours? It's not an "automated process" but it's a very fast way of working, and is pretty common.

For the final image, this would be pretty simple to replicate using photoshop brushes, using pencil mode to stay away from soft edges, as this is basically what they've done. Just start with darkest shades, and work up through your ramp as you paint layers. I suggest some editing afterwards to lose the obvious copypaste look, though some don't bother with this.

Edit: Something similar I've done in the past is painting one small piece of foliage very carefully, then copying and pasting it around the image on all areas of foliage. Then I paint the seams in and add variety. This saves a lot of time and if you paint it in enough, it's basically impossible to see any repetition.

This is very cool, lots of little touches that make this work nicely. Keep it up!

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/pfuHpWV.png[/imgzoom]

Tried an edit, maybe some of this will give you some ideas.