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Another vote for the flying pig.

(it looks like he has a SNES-style sprite conveyor there )

I resent that allegation!......I use slave labor.

*whips gnomes*

Cheers for the feedback y'all.

The only thing that comes to my mind is that the gryphon-riders leg maybe should be behind the gryphons wing.

I've tried both; legs behind puts the 'saddle' too far towards the mounts rear, and then you can swing for anyone without cutting a wing off. too late to do quick edits now. I'll try tomorrow night.

Those are really flat.

Here's a quick paintover focusing on volume:

x3

Guilty as charged. - I normally apply a dodge filter and a darken filter post animation for depth, to limit the number of colours I have to deal with when animating. I do like the edit though. and it brings us to....

Maybe a tad offtopic, but I always wnated to know, how this soft gradient is done on your pictures. Is it done manually, or using some editor tool?

Manually; as a rule it's 3-4 color depth for cloth, 4-5 for metals, and 6-7 for reflective surfaces. although reflective stuff gets set to border and internal during animation.

Definitely.
Although the skeleton does look a little on the dull side, unless that's just the faction colour.

He's factionless, so dull gray colours. The idea was to change the grey to red\blue\green\pink etc depending on which side was active, and add little touches like logos on the shields to make them unique.

[Tactical Airstrike]

Speaking of which, one I've just added last night - WMDs

Tactical Airstrike - knock half the health of a single unit targeted

Carpet Bomb - damages half of the health of the units in a 3x3 area

Apathy Bomb - a secret combination of narcotics and pamphlets on the futility of life and inevitability of the end causes the unit targeted to not want to move next turn

Weaponised Explodium Device - an immensely powerful but focused bomb, will destroy not just the unit targeted, but also the ground underneath it, leaving a picturesque new crater lake where forests/cities/bases once stood.

No spraying the enemy infantry with bear pheromones?

*disappointed*

I got a little bored over the weekend and dug out some old sketches for a fantasy wargame ( i.e. warsong \ Langrisser ), although I'm not completely happy with how they turned out;



I was assuming a 320 x 240 game, with out 30-40% of the screen area obscured by status screens. I went with the darker outline to try and keep a cartoony \ 16 bit feel.

The original idea (or at least what I can translate from my scribbling), was to use a primary colour for each faction, and a separate trim colour, then add little quirks like plumes, feathers, horns etc to add character.

Lastly, for anyone who takes an interest in this kind of stuff. the sketch to sprite process for them;
http://i858.photobucket.com/albums/ab150/Victorsix/warsongcreation.png
(Not extremely informative, but it does show roughly what I was doing)

What I want is for there to be 1 player(christen) and the 'pond'.I want christen to be on one side and the pond on the other side. Now I want it to be like final fantasy tactic's were if there is a pond to the left,right,top,or bottom of chris I want him to attack(jump over) same as for the pond.it is also just like chess.now if you have magic instock I want I were if you are in a spot were you are far away from the pond I want you to be able to cast magic or use potions cause if you were to be neer the pond would then want to use an item when it could just jump you? Also you have 4 hp balls and for every jump you lose 1. Now I am about to realese the demo for ags and the beta for pubmembers starting in 1-2 weeks so If you can help me then just let me know :]

Translation : A grid based tactics rpg battle system. With some obligatory stars \ orbs \ magic beans.

While in-game sounds cool, if any real life cop stopped on the job to consult a 110 page handbook before making a decision, he'd be fired by the end of the week.

That's your immersion dead just as quick as alt tabbing in my opinion.

How much of the 110 pages of text is actually relevant to the games puzzles, and how much would be fluff?

Dude. You should really repost when you sneak in new screenshots.

It is looking really nice now.

I'm a bit lost here. Isn't it possible to scale down and avoid out-of-focus sprites? If so, why not make all my sprites larger than the background and just scale down? Please excuse me if there is an obvious answer, but again, I'm totally new to this.

Quick example. filtered sprites to the left, unfiltered to the right.



For lack of a better name, lets call this little guy Bob. By default he's 40 pixels tall. If he gets larger or smaller he either becomes blocky or blurred, depending on the graphics filter. If he gets smaller, the details blurs together (or in the case of the unfiltered sprite, becomes a bit of a mess.)

Ideally you'd want to keep Bob at 100% scale as much as possible in the game, to avoid the ugly scaling effects.

Not an entry, but more of a make up numbers affair.



I reserve the right to amend the picture, or replace it with something sissy like a unicorn,  depending on how much I drink over the next 2 weeks.

Now, I'm planning on making the game at 640x480, so my main concerns are:

- Is the sprite big enough? Or, too big?

Depends. If you're using a lot of scaling, then sprites are rarely too big since it allows you to do close-ups without a horribly pixelated \ blurry mess. However it does mean that your sprite is virtually always out of focus.

As a rough guide I use 4-5 times the background height as a default scale. If he had a body
we'd be looking at a sprite larger than 480 pixels, which is a little excessive.

If it's a talking head though it's about right.

- Are my lines too thin?

Again, it depends on if you're using scaling, and if you're happy with out of focus shots. Thin lines are fine if you're not scaling too often. If you are using scaling you might want to consider using double thickness to reduce the breakup at halfscale.

best way to test this is to just resize the sprite in paint, without any blurring (assuming your paint program allows this.)

- How will it look when it's actually in the game?

Now this is the big fish. Ideally you should design your sprites around your game, not visa-versa. Since it's your first project ; Create a new ags game. Put in a box room background, import your sprite as the main character and then test it. It's the only way to be sure.

Seriously Vote, I can't announce a winner as it is now.

Is anyone else getting that 'service unavailable' message from the mags site?

Blizzards whacked out forum policy is suddenly making some sense to me.

Just to add to what everyone's saying;

Save yourself some time and don't bother. The effort involved in contacting SE for a cease-and-desist letter in return would be far better spent creating an original idea.

Just to clarify, does it actually have to be from a faerie tale, or is stabbing the AD&D monstrous manual to pick a page acceptable?

Congrats to SookieSock on this one, far more deserved imo.

By the way, Victor6, you forgot to pickup your golden trophy here:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=39789.msg525194#msg525194

I kinda remembered, in the obscure background humor reference way, but not in the obvious forum sig related fashion..... 

that'll make sense in about a year or two, honest.

*Cheap shot warning*

...left click does, right click offers options (for example something along "look at" command) - is that hard and complicated?

Apparently it is if you're an I-mac user.

The problem isn't the audience though, it's the designers. They're the ones looking at the audience profiling soundbites and catering for the bottom line.

If you don't give people the chance to learn, they'll never improve.

Once again, I pray that it won't happen. I'm just realistic. When the casual adventure games will take all the market, what room will be left for "real" adventure games? They already almost died after the mid-90's.

Oddly, when I read that article, I was thinking 'This is probably how they justified all those awful interactive movies during the 90's. Adventure games are big, make things simpler, make things prettier, flood the market.

That worked out well didn't it?

I suspect the concept of 'niche' is completely lost on some people. The games industry shouldn't be pandering to the casuals anymore. It only does that for the sake of cash flow worries, which are caused by ballooning dev costs, brought on by the need to satisfy casuals with pretty lights and shiny things.

Niche fans will buy something with middle of the range production standards if the game mechanics have depth. Casuals generally won't.

In terms of adventure games, there's one quote in there that sums up the problems with casuals and the genre :-

Hardcore gamers might read this and wonder if all casual game players are idiots, but this is not the case; they just need a very clear explanation what is required of them, as they're not compelled to figure it out for themselves like mainstream gamers are, and don't have years of stored up experience with gaming's tropes. It's a different mindset.

If you're not willing to think and work out how to do something, you're playing the wrong genre.

Out of time again, so no lighting, no shadows, no finished backdrop and no perspective correction.

....but hey, the flowers look pretty (and it makes up numbers bit.)

Hastily stolen and re-painted example from the archive, excuse the pink....


I'd suggest giving normal perspective the boot for kind of stuff. Take a look at examples like C&C and you'll find all the units are drawn from a fixed angle. At such small scales perspective just tends to make things look out of place. Stick to top-front-sides stuff.

I hope some one else is going to do one, I don't want to be all on my lonesome.

I did start one, however the summer heat keeps melting my brain and prevented me from finishing.