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Here is a rough idea of where you could go with the legs:



A couple of points struck me about the legs on your image:

The legs apart as they are doesn't really work at this angle. It makes it look like his legs are really rather far apart. This is because from an angle, the far leg sits behind the near leg.

Boots do not strike me as the type of footwear a burglar (if this is in fact one) would wear. If you are going to draw boots, it looks a little odd having them both at the same angle and also having the trousers go into them in this way.

You're doing well - hope this helps.

Spoiler

In the lounge room in the fruit bowl - look carefully

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Congratulations, Ryan. One of the coolest entries I've seen in an animation comp to date .

[The Winners:]

Nope - just wanted to make sure I didn't announce prematurely.

The Winners:

Winner of the bronze crab trophy, with a rather large slug and a comically oversized tumor is Strange Visitor.


Winner of the silver crab trophy, with a very amusing pair of fellows and a nicely oversized nose is Miguel.


And finally, winner of the golden crab trophy with his amusing depiction of an upset infant is ShonenAiGuy.


Well done to our three trophy winners and a big thankyou to everyone who entered their lovely sprites into the jam.

You can also use the "edit in default image editor" function (right click in the sprite manager) if you wish.

I have done this on occasion, and it can be rather handy.

Doesn't look too bad so far. Here are some suggestions from my end:



-Made arm muscles well defined but less prominent
-Raised knee height
-Added torso shading
-Adjusted face

Personally I dislike using whites for eyes, although I know a lot of people are for it. Just thought I'd show you another way of doing things

You are an insane crazy freak who has spent way too much time on this and I enjoy this animation.

Well done.

If you're running version 3.0 of the engine and use Direct 3d I honestly cannot see it slowing the system down much .

I have some rough ideas on how I'd do water. But to do this, remember we'd need to include a transition from grass to water - that being sand. Let's give this a shot, shall we?



Four new tiles here. I've used three shades for the sand and 4 shades for the water. Using more shades than this can get you nicer graphics but I like to keep things simple.

Let us have a go at putting these together, hey?



It's kind of repetitive and square, but it is a start. The next step from here would be angled tiles to make things look curvy, but this will do for this example. I like to put a fair bit of beach in, and hey - we can use these sand tiles to make a desert, perhaps! This is the beauty of tiles . Keep in mind that water is animated, so in an ideal situation the two tiles here with water should be animated. This could prove to be a fair bit of extra work, however, so you may wish to give it a miss.

Last of all, if you do plan on putting units on the water, think carefully about how their shadows should look. If you adjust the shadow, you can give the water a nice appearance of depth:



I've used transparency here, which you may wish to consider using in the game. This is probably not the best way of doing it, but I'm a newbie here too .

Hope this helps .

EDIT: Also, Orator's edit is good. My water looks kinda shallow. I was stuck in beach resort mode

Works fine for me.

Ah, of course, this makes plenty of sense as to why it wouldn't work for the second animation.

Thanks for clarification .

Interesting to see another RTS appear.

I've put some graphical notes over in the Critic's Lounge if you are interested.

Good luck with your game.

JP, just went into the GIP thread and saw your screenshots. I noticed you have advertised for a background artist, and suggest you continue to pursue this route. My question, however, is whether you've considered tile based terrain. As far as I am aware, this is the norm for all of the old 2d RTS games, such as the Warcraft and the C&C series.

Let's have a look at tiles, shall we? I've never done RTS tile before, but if they can do it, so can I, right? . Because they're tiny, I'll show them at twice normal size.

Here are some tiles I drew up this morning:



There's nothing special here - the grass is 3 different shades of green, the cliff is two of purple, two of browny orange. 7 shades is nothing, really, but it is how we use them. Let's put them together and see if we can do something with them. I've flipped a couple here, but otherwise these are just our same few tiles:



Not too bad, is it? It's not really too repetitive (I used a secondary grass tile here to make sure we had some nice breaking up of the standard pattern) and it has some detail .

To stay on topic, let's put some units on top:



3 shades of blue, 3 shades of black and the 2 orange shades borrowed from the cliff. And hey - that almost looks like a real RTS!

If you build yourself a nice little database of tiles in this manner, you can "build" backgrounds rather than having to draw them, and this doesn't take nearly as long .

I hope I've been clear here - good luck with your game whichever path you choose to take. If I was to critique my own images, I'd make the units stand more out from the grass, perhaps make the grass tile a bit better, cut down the saturation of the grass and put some shadows down the bottom of the cliff, but it is a start at the least.

EDIT: I don't mean to ramble here, but I did mean to mention this before and forgot.

A tank, to me, seems like a bad choice for a unit in an RTS game. The reason is that, unless you're content with it looking stiff, you're going to want the turret moving. What this, in my head, represents is a second "character" on top of the tank base that is the turret and follows the tank everywhere, turning seperately. I cannot imagine this being fun to script at all. You have to take into account turning, different angles, shadows.... blergh. However, if you're happy to have a fixed turret, I guess go for it. Just thought I'd bring it up.

Ah, how interesting. I was unaware that the timer would be placed in an off state here.

Nevertheless, your solution works, and I am most grateful .

Hey all,

Sorry about the potentially confusing title, but I have a strange issue and am not sure how to get around it.

Unable to change the idle animation delay for a character (that I am aware of) and needing to do this, I adapted the following piece of code to have my character run an idle animation at the delay I wished. It is in repeatedly execute:

Code: ags

if (IsTimerExpired (1) == 1 && GetGlobalInt(11)==1 && GetGlobalInt(16)==0) {
   cBoy.LockView(19);
   cBoy.Animate(0, 1, eOnce, eBlock, eForwards);
   cBoy.Animate(3, 4, eOnce, eNoBlock, eForwards);
   SetTimer (1, GetGameSpeed()*15);
}
else if (IsTimerExpired (1) == 1 && GetGlobalInt(11)==1 && GetGlobalInt(16)==1) {
   cBoy.LockView(26);
   cBoy.Animate(5 , 1, eOnce, eBlock, eForwards);
   cBoy.Say("y hallo thar");
   SetTimer (1, GetGameSpeed()*15);
}
  else if (cBoy.Animating == 0 && GetGlobalInt(11)==1) { // i.e. won't run during idle anim
    cBoy.UnlockView();
    }

This all works fine and dandy until GlobalInt(16) = 1. At this point, nothing occurs.

Is there something I missed here? I thought it might be the timer needing to be reset, which I tried, but this didn't seem to fix anything. Just for notes: GlobalInt(11) is to make sure the player is in the room, because having a blocking animation running in another room is not good . GlobalInt(16) is when the character is no longer holding an item, therefore the idle animation needs to be different.

Thankyou in advance for your help .

Nik, with regards to the puzzles, it could just be me being dumb. I have played through 3 other commercial AGS adventures (being The Shivah, The Blackwell Legacy and Super Jazz Man) and this is by far the one with the most difficult puzzles. I'm not saying they're bad puzzles, necessarily. I'm just saying it took me a lot longer to work through them . This made the game slower paced, and I bore quickly.

With regards to the being brave about bringing the issues to the table - agreed. A big, bold move, especially in his first commercial outing, which is why I am pleased he managed to pull it off without the typical fake Hollywood sheen applied to such story devices. I think it is safe to say that Alkis has presented these issues in a very mature way. I read a lot about the ending being a surprise, but:

Spoiler

When I saw the dream sequence, I pretty much guessed straight away what the ending would be, and was fairly well close. I did not expect one part right near the very end, so well done to Alkis for managing to surprise me, even just a little bit, when I thought I was the clever one who had everything figured out

[close]

There is no "discussion" about you getting the tracks perfect, Nik. It is obvious you captured the exact mood that was needed for the cutscenes.

There is a huge conversation that I could enter into about this game, and the ground it covers but I choose not to. Suffice to say that it is nice to have a game that makes you think about it afterwards as well - and not just because of the cool bit where you jumped the table in the kitchen and shot the guy as he was coming around the doorway.

Also, I meant to say this in my earlier post, but had to rush out to dinner with friends: Congratulations to Alkis for getting this game done, good luck with the sales of this, and I shall be watching to see your next steps . Also to Alkis, as shallow as it may seem, your graphics, particularly character graphics, are holding you back. I encourage you to consider your options for the next game - enormous amounts of character scaling here made the walking animation seem even more awkward than the awkwardness it usually had, the angles were completely off perspective... the list goes on. I don't wish to offend your character artist, but considering this was someone who accepted a contract to produce graphics which are of a professional level, I believe you've been let down here  . I'm sure you know this already.

Giving him a forehead (most people have one ) can perhaps make him look a bit angrier - it lets you show eyebrows.

Just finished the game now.

As I am sure most people feel, the character graphics and animation does let the game down. I stopped noticing this after a while, however, so I guess the good points must have overruled this.

Puzzle wise, whilst many of them were obviously well thought out they did have a tendency to be convoluted. While I know some people like this sort of gameplay, I personally do not. It made the game of a good length, but a lot of this length was me trying to figure out exactly what to do next. In one instance, I swear I did something the correct way 10 times before trying again and it suddenly working. This aside, the majority of the puzzles were logical, provided one was prepared to work hard to find the logic .

The story and the issues dealt with are the obvious strengths here - well done for touching on some more interesting issues than are usually found in computer games, and for doing so in a way that didn't, at least to me, seem cheesy or overdone in the typical "evil villain" way.

Nik, with regards to your music: Thanks for making me jump at all the right moments and giving me goosebumps . I always find something that has good music can suck me in much easier, and I found your work here exceptional.

Overall, nice game, and I shall play it again in a while, just to re-experience the atmoshpere .

First of all - these look very obviously like images that have been resized - mainly because when you resized them you didn't redefine the image (or didn't do it well enough).

I cannot see these things as being very hard to draw. Have you tried drawing them yourself?

Secondly, these don't look like live sprites on the map to me. A tank at that perspective wouldn't work well in any RTS I've played. If these are for a selection menu or something similar, they work fine at the angle they're on. Mind giving us a screenshot of the game showing exactly how they look ingame?

How about an edit anyway, just for a different take on the subject?

I always find it interesting to have a number of different ideas to examine.