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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.

Thanks Snarky, and yeah, I agree, you can see me talk more about the stiff postures, including TB, in that article I linked to.

As for template walkcycles (and animations in general), yep, the combination of a couple of new factors to contend with - higher resolution, and the fact that there were 6 main characters who'd be fully animated, meant I had to do something to make a very intimidating project more manageable. I agree that they walk a bit stiffly! I've since sunk some time and study into better 640 res walkcycles, hopefully making some improvements for next time around!

Some fun insight into the dev progress from my side:

I recently have had some free time to work on whatever I think needs polish while Dave is designing the next section, and my efforts in character art study made me feel like the front and back character sprites needed some work. Dave agreed to me editing them, and after several iterations, with input from clever friends, you can see the difference here:



The old ones are pretty funny and bad, really. Designing a character sprite at this resolution, in this "more realistic" style than I cut my teeth on, takes me a really long time. Grundislav was inspired by my first redesign to increase the entire resolution of the sprites in his game, and he's probably been faster at doing that than I have at reworking these. Damn him.

Anyway, this represents my personal growth in a year and a half of work and learning in this new resolution, in an area that I'm not very good at. I'm currently reworking hundreds of frames of animations slightly to make these fit in more, but the change feels worth it. It's cool to have the opportunity to spend time learning this stuff, and now I feel less guilty when I work on the next, super secret project that the sprites in Unavowed look so weak in comparison, because I had a year in which to learn how to draw those better. You folks have always seemed to follow my personal growth with interest, so I wanted to show these off so you could see what I've been learning.

For those of you interested in a slightly more comprehensive breakdown and comparison of silhouettes in character design for adventure games, I wrote an article about this over on Adventure Gamers for my A Look at Graphics series.

With all that said, back to the drawing board with me. Literally.
I still haven't learned how to improve my jokes yet, Dave won't let me spend any time on that. I bet it's because he thinks my jokes are REALLY GOOD and he'd be very, very upset if I changed them. : D

I believe Francisco has fixed the airshow puzzle in AGW somewhat, after we all complained, so hopefully you play it and think "What on earth was he grumbling about?"

I agree that action stuff definitely helps certain games work. Indy, Conquests of Camelot/The Longbow, Quests for Glory, Full Throttle and the like have both narratives and character that almost demand action sequences of the script. Sometimes it's okay to do clever things within the existing mechanics, such as with insult swordfighting, but actiony sequences are definitely worthwhile, too. We have things along these lines in both Technobabylon and Shardlight - to varying degrees of success, probably - and I think some of this comes down to the "adventure" part of the genre - it's fun for danger to be dangerous.

I also completely understand when players complain about the action in, well, all of those mentioned before. It's clearly not everybody's cup of tea. Nothing is. Especially limiting saves to prevent save scumming.

I think the main reason I was so quick to caution Francisco against designing with timers is because two of the sections that frustrated me the most in A Golden Wake (The bakery granny and the airshow bit) frustrated me because of their use of timers in a way that didn't feel very fair, so I was most likely heavily biased against them because I was speaking directly to him. It makes me think that using timers is very hard to balance well, and that basing a whole game around them would be a balancing nightmare. Even more so than usual with games.

I certainly think it's important to not generalise when it comes to timers, mazes, deaths and action sequences. I only have to think of Fate of Atlantis, which used all four of these and still feels very enjoyable to play - perhaps even because of these elements, in some cases, though I accept that many dislike parts in Atlantis - to be convinced.

What I do think is important, though, is that players be notified of this stuff so that they can save their game appropriately, or even rely on autosaves to counter them (as we use in WEG), and make it obvious that "This is why you failed". A friend had to retry that granny bakery puzzle about 20 times because he'd clicked on the right thing, but just as the timer was expiring, so he thought he'd clicked the wrong thing. He then tried every other weird combination before coming back to it, in frustration, and solving the section.

As for Thimbleweed Park, I watched someone play a little bit of it - up to the Sheriff-a-rena-a-whoo chap. I was mostly surprised that it has even more fourth wall breaking jokes than Monkey Island does. I haven't started it myself, though, because various friends of mine have had incredibly negative reactions to playing the game, especially the ending, and so I've not been in a rush to try it too much for myself. It's one of those games that seems to be quite divisive, though, as I also know several friends who've thought its brand of humour is pure genius.

Cool animations!

Something that worries me about this point of view is that we will expect the way a character's perspective appears to change with relation to the vanishing point, which is in the centre of the image, as he moves around the screen. This is hard to do with 2D sprites, and if you don't do it, will probably look badly off.

This is a problem with standard side-on views, but much less so - because there's much less depth to the shape we're representing in that case, we mostly get away with it. Here you're going to be showing us a character from their most deep angle, and the unchanging perspective of that character will present problems.