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Hehehe

Grundislav Games: Turning everyday life into a difficult adventure game puzzle.


Awesome  .

Hey again everyone, and thankyou for your comments.

Mr Buckethead - The green may be hideous, but I'm afraid it's staying. I wanted to go with cool colours for the lights and warm colours for the buildings, so green was the closest I was prepared to get to yellow. Thanks for the suggestion anyway.

Erwin - Yeah, I know that it does look kinda alien-y. I am hoping that the rest of the backgrounds will be normal cityish enough to make up for it - but I didn't want to have a shoebox shaped building because I'm bored of drawing them .

Loominous - Well, I suppose - here's one I did with brushes. It's not any better than a sketch, and the colours are awful, but it was during my planning the background. I had a lot of trouble using the brushes to get the shapes I wanted - I'm hoping to get a graphics tablet so I can draw easier that with the mouse, but until then I'm afraid it's probably going to be straight lines for me.

LimpingFish = Awesome!

On to the pictures:

Painted style as mentioned by Loominous (very ashamed of it too  )


And latest version of the background:


A couple of quick notes:

I tried channel mixing for the first time here and am rather pleased with the result (and resulting page full of scribbled notes), so hopefully the balance between the highlights and shadows etc will be pleasing.

I also wonder at the number of colours here. Over 19000?!?! I tried colour reducing with Paint Shop Pro 4, but it seems to reduce the quality to what I consider an unnacceptable point. The image is rather grainy in places, but that was intentional. Any tips?

Also, I'm thinking that polishing aside, I'm going to tentatively say that this is almost done. Are the bare-ish walls a major concern to anyone? I want to move on to other backgrounds, but I don't want to miss out on any opportunity to improve this one.

Thanks, all.

Vict0r - Ah ha! I KNEW I couldn't be alone in this case. How do the companies manage to keep selling that stuff when it's obvious it is so bad? I'd rather take my own tin of powder and buy plain milk at the store when I'm thirsty and mix it in.

In fact.... (considers taking tin of chocolate powder everywhere)

Domino - Nope, I can't say I've ever had it. Damn, there be a lot of things in that. But chocolate flavoured water? I cannot imagine enjoying such a thing!

Akatosh,

I've always sort of glanced at your games and sort of "meh'd" them. I decided to give this one a shot and will now be playing your other games.

Most enjoyable.

Is it just me, or is the powder that you stir in FAR superior to the boxes and bottles of chocolate milk that you purchase pre mixed?

Chocolate milk in a container that is premixed always disappoints me - I've only ever had one that I liked, and that was diet chocolate milk - even though I usually hate diet food. I think the milk flavour was so weak that the chocolate flavour came through better.

Nesquik appears to be far superior flavour wise.

HAHAA love that Star Trek one Nightfable!

Stu my man, if so, I'm worried.

Have you talked to the bartender after using the memo as much as you can and talking to your friends?

I think I know what it is you need to work on.

Giving your skills to me...

This is wonderful.

Gilbot, that is absolutely gorgeous!

Glad you like the way it is turning out - this isn't based off one of Andail's tutorials as such, although I have been paying close attention to his stuff to see what he does, so you may see some recycled technique from one or more of his works.

Okay everyone, time is up.

First place goes to ArboriS with his dragon.

Second place to Indie Boy with the dinosaur stripes

Joint third place to beeblebrox and FSi for giving the creatures an interesting background.

Thanks to everyone who entered - thankyou Neil Dnuma for your wonderful interpretation (even though it didn't follow the rules )

Mmm... still have plenty of work to do. Here is a quick update:

I think people rely on alcohol to weaken their inhibitions, when you don't really need it that much. It's just stage fright.

I can't emphasize enough how heavily I have to object to that statement.

It's like vegetarians who go on and on about how unhealthy meat is. I don't enjoy eating meat because it's unhealthy but because IMO it tastes better than anything else.

It's very similar with alcohol: weakened inhibitions is a neat side-effect, but I drink for the dramatically increased fun-factor.
I think it's funny how non-drinkers always assume all people who get drunk only do it to overcome their shy, reclusive personality. How incredibly arrogant.

If it weren't for the occasional bad consequences after people drank too much, nobody would object to drinking alcohol in the first place.

Mmmm... I can see how it comes across as arrogant. This was not my intent, and I don't mean to judge people that drink alcohol. My point was that not drinking alcohol doesn't mean that you cannot have fun, and that there are sometimes bad consequences when people do drink too much alcohol. My previous statement was far too general to be effective, and was based on the nature of one or two friends who use it as such. I have other friends who are incredibly outgoing without alcohol, and still more so with alcohol.

Hahahaha, before I read SSH's post I thought the exact same thing...

I have an interesting perspective on the situation. I don't drink or smoke (mainly because I've never gotten anything out of it when I tried it) but I always seem to be one of the people having the most fun at a party. I think people rely on alcohol to weaken their inhibitions, when you don't really need it that much. It's just stage fright.

I get into a state I refer to as "drunk on people" - I just relax completely and join in all the fun (and start some of it  ), but a case in point was that the last party I went to (ages ago now, actually), one of my friends got hurt due to drunken activity, and being the only sober one I was able to drive him to hospital without any problems. I also end up carting my friends/brother around, though, so if you don't want to drink and still want to hang out at parties, prepare to be Mr. Taxi.

The last little point I have (have I had any points yet?) would be about peer pressure. I have had most of my mates try to push alcohol to me, when they do I explain I don't enjoy drinking it and most of them respect that. It's no real worry, I've found, unlike what my teachers told me back in high school. Stand up for your beliefs man. If you're having fun now, they must be right for you.

Hey all,

As usual am trying to improve the quality of the graphics I'm producing. I've tried painting as one would by hand and are not happy with the way these turn out, so I've tried to refine the technique I used for the Trance-Pacific backgrounds.



This is a WIP of the outside of what is intended to be a nightclub. I've used a fair few layers here, but I'm hoping to get some feedback on what to improve and what I've added that shouldn't have been added. The little logo is just a placeholder... I'm yet to figure out how to make it look like a neon light.

For reference, this was made in the Gimp.

Cheers all.

Wow, Lucifiel, thanks for the comments. I'll try and reply to everything as I see it:

Graphics were kinda rushed as they were a product of me trying to get used to a new way of doing backgrounds and putting lighting etc in, so I sometimes had more shadow than highlight and therefore not enough contrast. Thanks for noticing it anyway.

The perspective was also me experimenting with a two point perspective as I was totally sick of limiting myself to the one point cube rooms I'd seen everywhere. The plan is to hopefully eliminate the black edgy bits eventually.

About smallness of hotspots.... which bits exactly did you find a pixel hunt? We tried to ensure we avoided all annoying little "omg I can click on the rabbit!?" moments...

The way I saw it, we only really had two red herrings:

Spoiler

The pen, obviously, and the ladder/light/switch hint to frustrate people a bit

[close]

We didn't think those were over the top... just enough to add a little bit more difficulty into the game. We were worried people would finish the game in like 10 minutes.

Finally, well... I had originally hoped to make the game without any items whatsoever, and just use the memory device but it was more sensible to have some items. I didn't think 6 items was really too many and had hoped that the main point of the game would be the memo... I worried that if we had heaps of object puzzles and one or 2 memory puzzles that the memo would get passed of as a useless gimmick. Feedback seems to indicate people wished we'd used it more than we did... are you saying you wanted more object based puzzles, or less of them?

Thanks for playing!

Edit - Thanks CosmoQueen ....

WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!?



After attempts to accelerate the evolution process were altered by a junior scientist accidentally spilling mustard in the test area, the following creature has evolved over a period of 3 months.

Your job is to give the creature character... you may alter the lines so long as we can recognise it as the original sprite. Will it be a herbivore or a carnivore? Will it have skin, fur, scales or feathers or slime? Will it be brown, or turquoise? These, daring colorists, are the questions you must ask.

Max colours = 25

As usual, bonus points for any extra creativity (whether color or concept wise).

Get coloring!

Wargh! I've been hiding, yes, internet access is less available for me these days...

And I didn't expect to win this one, so it slipped my mind. I've got a new sprite ready, so check out the new thread and get colouring! And well done to all other entries!

Oh alright, only if you let me use a weird pallette  .

Selective Industries presents: The Prejumatic 80000. Tired of unsavoury sorts entering your home/shop/school/library/cafe?

The Prejumatic 80000 automatically scans all would be entrants through a doorway for any personality traits which may be considered undesirable. It has a capacity to store 300 programmable traits to auto-reject - anybody with a trait which has been undefined has the list of their full personal profile displayed on screen for manual override/rejection.

Batteries not included.



7 colours including background.

My honest opinion is that staying low res for a while is a good idea, to get the hang of shading, posture and animation because it's quicker to make changes at a lower res.

My advice for now would be if you want to draw pixelart keep it low res until your comfortable in low res, then move up to a higher level. Means you spend less time on details and more time on the form and style of the character.