Messages

Blackwell stuff (at least the stuff I did) was painted in Photoshop Elements (the cheap version!) with a Wacom tablet. It's not much like painting with actual paint, but it's also not much like working pixel by pixel, either!

It's okay everybody, please relax, I have animated him skidding to a halt.

(the backwards boat is all Dave, though )

These are so great! Looking forward to this even more now!

Hey, that's awesome. Congratulations to the both of you! I love seeing long running projects like this coming to fruition.

Congrats mate!

The choice of colors and lights you use has a weird harmony I can't put my finger on. The orange background sky and the blue indoor lights shouldn't work together in theory but they do!

A lot of my colour choices are pretty standard examples of using a palette of complementary colours - I like how they allow very strong contrasts between zones of an image. In this case, however, I was trying to work the three traditional primary colours into a single shot for the sake of experimentation, and making a nice blue bit for the warmly coloured Constantine to be framed by and a nice reddish bit for the coolly coloured Morpheus and Death to be framed by.

I've just realized, the dark gritty look, a guy with a trench-coat wielding magic, this looks very similar to Constantine.
Why did they have to cancel that TV show. (At least there are the comics I suppose.)

Funnily enough the palette for this game evolved directly from when I was messing around with Constantine/Sandman stuff after WB mentioned they were interested in an adventure game to Dave!

Thanks for all the time you've put into AGS and the valuable additions you've made to the engine. Sorry to hear that you feel some regret and frustration because of it, all big projects leave me with some regrets, but again, your work has been very useful. Maybe you don't feel like you've done it the right way, or the best way, or that you wasted time, but many of the additions that you've implemented have been what's helped us to keep using the engine. Very appreciated mate!

Hey Pijin, cool to see you on the forums finally, I hope you've got better internet than you did when we last spoke (it was 2009!)

I've used some game engines that have inbuilt graphics editors and stuff, but always found myself most comfortable going back to the trusty graphics software I learned on. There's definitely some appeal in what you speak of, but ultimately I think it'd result in games that all feel quite similar. Would it be cool to have an engine that does the heavy lifting of making environments and characters for newbies, though? Yeah, it would.

This already *kind of* exists in engines like Unity - you can import premade assets from the "Unity store" and piece your projects together like that. It's not quite the same, but maybe a step towards what you're looking for. You can export to multiple platforms, in a well supported engine, and it handles a lot of the work for you. Of course, it's not quite that easy; nothing always is. But maybe if your internet is better then you'd be interested in checking it out!

That aside, I'd rather see more of your personal art in a game by Pijin Pastrana rather than premade assets. In any case, good to see you're still around and interested in making games!

So cool!

[Nixxon]

Aw, what a nice game! I had to do a bit of guessing at some of the puzzles, but felt they were mostly pretty well done. Great background art, and a nice idea for a story (which made me laugh at the poor guy's confusion).

Nixxon:

Spoiler

Have you opened the safe? The clue you need is on the second screen!

[close]

I've been meaning to play this one, but the announcement of this version makes me want to wait for the shinier version! Good luck getting this thing tightened up!

[Over the Garden Wall]

However, the recent(ish) kids' cartoon I think is a real goddamn masterpiece is Over the Garden Wall.

I loved this.

Hooray for the first issue making it! I definitely approve of having the Mags theme and the "Games released this month" sections, very sensible ideas. I wonder if you could have a section for "Games announced this month" similar to the "announced" section with screenshots as well as links, rather than just links in the editorial?

Thanks for giving this a shot, and extra thanks for the link to my little thing! I hope this newsletter takes off!

This looks very good! A fun premise and wonderful graphics. I really look forward to playing this game, keep up the good work!

[dactylopus]

dactylopus: Thanks! Glad you enjoyed the post!

Yitcomics: Hooray, thank you, and you're welcome!

Mandle: It might be! Hard to say - that's a really extreme example, but I guess it shows that sometimes an extreme push is what's needed. Interesting anecdote, thanks for sharing!

This is fun, responsive to control and cute to play! I wonder how hard it'd be to add goals/an endgame mechanic to it, because in this format I could basically just sit here and play forever, collecting bananas to make up for the very rare life I lost. Maybe "Travel a certain distance to get to the island" or maybe a way of speeding things up as the player plays, to make it more and more difficult, with a high score in time at the end. I think this would add something cool to the experience.

Anyway, nice work, it plays super well!

PM sent!

I have a spare key for Hero of the Kingdom if anybody is interested!

Claimed

Very nice of you to say, thank you!