Messages

Colorize the monsters, but do away with the balck outlines, especially the interior ones (like on its eyeball). Is there any way you could shade them like the portraits? Do they need to be that big?

This is what Ben Throttle would look like if the game was made in the late 80s.

Ok, I pixelled over your original sprite, picking mostly all new colors. I pared your color count down to 11, which should be more usable in AGS. Probably easier to animate, too.

Looks like you beat me to it in the paintover department. A quick suggestion: try hand-picking every color you use in your sprites. The end result will outshine a sprite that you used an automatic palette reduction on.

Maybe you could try making the color of the buttes in the background more saturated to enhance the illusion of distance from the midground.

EDIT: Crap, I meant less saturated. My bad.

I think you definitely need to cut the color count. Right now there are easily a half dozen or so shades of very dark brown in his jacket. If you're really having trouble, I think I cut cut the count down to 20 by hand without losing the essence of the sprite.

I like the color choices in the top one better, although the golden trophy (?) seems to stand out too much.

Loved your game, Mr. C! I especially liked how much exra animation you did (moving the cannisters, etc.) and your incorporation of the kick command (good for a few interactions).

I did find a bug when I was playing however... If you get a chance, you might want to fix it.

Spoiler

If you don't kick the drain away to open the downstairs door with the broom (it's easy to miss) and operate the magnet instead, the game crashes with an error message about a missing view.

[close]

I would definitely change the name...
"Bob Smith's Mystery Case" comes to mind. Even "The Mystery Case" would be an improvement over the wordy original.

On the Dark Horse Comics website, they have a bunch of Hellboy ecomics that are made in Flash. They sport minimal animation and a few sounds. You move at your own pace because there're previous and next arrows below the comic frame. It's worth checking out.

I love it, but how do you quit?

Ok, forget the health and AP bars, I just mentioned them for background.

What I really wanted to focus on was the SINGLE health bar. This bar could have as many as three colors on it (red for health, yellow for damage, and orange for "patched-up damage") at a time. I think my last post explains it pretty well, so read it again.

Or better yet, download JA from Home of the Underdogs.

[Crusader W]

Crusader W

2x zoom, 160x200, 9 colors (not counting bg color)


In case you didn't get it, his true identity is George W. Bush, U.S. prez. Notice his sword of justice and oily armor. I'm not complaining though, I would've voted for him over his rival, "The Human Pickle".

If you ever played Jagged Alliance, they had a really good system for your health. By each character portrait (along the side of the screen), there were three bars, one for breath (energy, which affects your action points), one for action points, and a red bar for health.

Some mercenaries had more health to start out with, thus a taller bar (something like one pixel for every four points of health). As soon as he/she got hit, the red bar would shrink to reflect the amount of the damage. That part of the red bar would be replaced by yellow. Any character who had yellow would bleed every turn, gradually losing more hit points.

As the character received medical attention (which took time depending upon where he/she was damaged, how critical the wound was, and how good the medic was), the yellow part of the bar would get replaced by orange.

Once patched up, the character would no longer bleed, but if he/she got hit again, the damage took its toll on the red part of the bar.

A character could only truly heal if they were put on medical leave between missions. Medics kept your mercenaries from bleeding to death, but they couldn't magically restore health.

As a result, this system added realism to the game without creating a lot of complexity.

I think I would find your comics slightly more interesting if the text was legible.

I definitely would like it better if it was more structured (a rhyme pattern or rhythm).  Also, the repeated use of the word "and" to start a line doesn't give anything to the poem. The subject matter itself is confusing...
Is the unexpected visitor scuffing the writer's shoes on a mat? Is the writer scuffing his own shoes? If his shoes are clean, why bother wiping them on a mat? The hallway line comes as a surprise, especially since the stage is set along a misty road.

Your poem is very mysterious, but it is too cryptic to be understood. Good classical poetry disguises its meaning, but provides enough information for the reader to understand it.

I think you need to differentiate the browns from each other to make you scene clearer. As it is, two of the tree trunks, the dirt, the shore, and the bridge all look very similar in color.

Orgasmic.

I really like the way you use warm colors in your outdoor scenes (telling the player its autumn) and the cool colors for the indoor scenes. Very nice device.

If you stop making your backgrounds green, I will have to kick you in the shin. Honestly, it's such a unique style that I'm envious. So stop this crap about using other colors.

One brother doing the art, the other doing the scripting and music...

That sounds so familiar...