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Looks fine to me.

Perhaps make his facial features stand out just a little bit more.

Akatosh my man,

Not to be too harsh or anything, but the only things that even remotely suggest that this dude is a president is the hat and medals. I think the best place to start on this is to think of what you'd expect a president to look like and do a charicature. It may look stereotypical, but it should work. Things like shading and colouring will rarely add as much character as a good solid lineart as basis. To demonstrate (hopefully) what I mean, take this quick lineart I did of how I'd imagine your El Presidente:



I've given him a pose which I'd expect to see of a character like this, gave him a proper uniform (as opposed to trousers and a sweater with medals and a hat), made him a little portly and also kinda happy looking. I haven't coloured because I think lineart should be your focus right now - try drawing your own rather than using someone else's and then focus on colouring when you've got solid linework.

Hope it helps.

Hi MT,

I hate having the flu - this is the 3rd time I've had it this year. I should eat more vegetables and fruit.

We played our first gig on Saturday night - there were about 200 people there and we did well. I also got my head shaved along with 3 friends. Going from 38cm to 0cm has been a little strange, but we raised $4000 for cancer research by doing it.

Should get out more and find me someone to get a crush on....

Alright, some edits and a new one for y'all:





As usual, all crits appreciated.

Damn! These things have some class. All your portraits have great feel of personality.

I'd like to mention that the green in the blue part of the last portraits eye's is awesome.

Keep em coming!

My most sincere thanks for this tutorial Andail. I hope I can learn a lot from it.

Also, make his arms longer.

Not to counter Nostradamus' comment about the lack of item interaction being a negative thing, but I must say that I personally found it very refreshing to see an adventure game that did not rely so heavily on item based puzzles to progress the game. My personal opinion is that item collection makes adventure games drudgery, and while it can be good when done well, it is often not done well.

My thanks to you for not relying so heavily on item based puzzles.

Hey everyone,

Thankyou for your latest crits on the images - and nice comments.

I see that I need to adjust posture - thanks for the tips here, I shall be doing this tonight. My computer does not actually have internet access currently, so I have to transfer files onto this one to upload which means things take a little longer for me to put the up, but expect an update soon. I'm also trying my first background for ages in 640x480 - so expect to see something about that soon  .

Thanks again, all.

Alrighty!

I've done a bit of mucking around - here is what they're looking like presently. I also have redone the sprites for 640x480 resolution.

I have to admit it's been ages since I've tried to do anything for 640x480 so I probably made loads of mistakes, but I guess I'm kinda happy with them currently.




All crits appreciated  .

Woah.

Lots of awesome advice - thankyou everyone for your efforts. I can see its going to take me a while to fix these suckers up. Nightfable, Uhfgood and Sparky, thankyou for taking the time to do paintovers. Uhfgood - thankyou also for your in depth detailing of what you've done.

I'm not on my own computer at the moment, but as soon as I get the chance I'm gonna play with these things and see what I can do. Your support is very much appreciated, all.

Hey all,

Just tried my hand at my first character speech portraits - hoping to get some feedback on them. I've put the intended sprites next to them for comparisons sake.





I get the feeling that the fella might be a bit feminine, and I couldn't get his hair looking very good, but I'm fairly happy with them as first efforts.

Tried to keep the colour count under 10 for the portraits to make animating easier - and didn't want to do dithering.

CosmoQueen - I think we've considered a sequel, but are not 100% on our next focus as yet. Know that the plan is to continue making games.

Splat44 - Thankyou for your kind comments. It is very nice to have won the competition, especially seeing how many other people spent their time on entries. Also thanks to Paolo - this is as much his game as it is mine, and he has been great to work with.

Well you did say paintovers were totally welcome...



Basically changed the posture to how I thought it was good and then detailed it. Basically redid the sprite in the style I've been using lately. Overall a nice sprite idea. I think the level of saturation in your colours might be holding you back a little - but that could just be me.

Thankyou for your vote, and for the luck you wish. This MAGS competition has seem some really cool entries - It's been an awesome one to take part in!

I am glad you didn't find guesswork - I am very concious of how quickly the genre can grow stale with obscure puzzles, and we tried hard to avoid the "get key for door" puzzles.

Thankyou for your encouragement.

Of course, the game probably seems a bit short as we had to limit ourselves ambition wise due to the short time a MAGS competition allows for development. I think we'd prefer to have half an hour of good gameplay to having 3 hours of poorly planned out, frustrating gameplay.

Admittedly some of the puzzles were a little bit of guesswork, but we made sure that we put hints in for basically everything - if you pay enough attention to cutscenes and conversations. It disappoints me that you found the last puzzle to be guesswork, Akatosh, but we did want to make sure that it was not too easy, and I think the hints are there. The last thing we wanted to do was give the player 18 items and 200 hotspots and turn the game into a boring guessfest.

I think also the small size room-wise of the game (ie not being able to walk around the whole thing at one time, not having 20 rooms) probably made the game seem short, as you aren't required to travel far in order to get resources you need for the puzzles. I think the whole point of the Memo innovation was to reward players for being creative... initially I hoped to do the game without any inventory items at all, but time constraints meant we tried to find a right balance between standard puzzles and Memo-type puzzles. Paolo did a good job of interpreting our ideas into puzzles - I think if one had more time the whole usage of the Memo could be expanded, but I am pleased with the end result.

Sorry for writing so much, and thankyou for playing our game. Akatosh - your vote is appreciated, my man.

I have to admit I agree with Brad - this AGS has been awesome. 7 entries incredible, and there's buckets of variety within them!

Good work on topic choice, Akatosh.

Hey everyone!

Glad you're enjoying the game, and thanks for helping us get rid of those little bugs.

To everyone who commented on the graphics - I love you guys  !

Also glad that the Memo concept has gone down fairly well thus far - my biggest fear was that we would implement it incorrectly and that it would appear to be merely a gimmick. Hopefully this is not the case.

Cheers!

dkh, have only had a quick chance to play your game, but nice work!

Will definitely be loading this one up again!

I agree she is very well done for a sprite without shading. Just a little question - Is there like a tear in the cuff of her right sleeve on her jumper? I seem to be able to see her hand through there....