Messages

Yeah, I have a couple of ideas that may see the light of day for fan games in the future, but only as part of a dedicated team (I doubt I'd ever be able to do them justice on my own). I've got a possible three in the ideas stage (The Dawn game set in the Buffyverse being one of them, but not the most likely to be made), with the other two currently vying for 'next active project' status alongside the ongoing development of my other game.

Hmm, looks interesting.

Not to sound too pedantic here, but it's actually spelled 'existence'.

Yeah, I quite like it, though I do think the cymbal needs to be toned way down, or maybe replaced with a softer style of cymbal. Otherwise, pretty decent.

[Character Art/Cutscenes]

I'm available for the following areas for the right project, PM me if you want to talk things through. You can check some samples of my work by visiting the StarTrippers link in my sig.

Character Art/Cutscenes
Preferably for high-res (640x480+) projects, and I mainly work best in a large-form, first person or dramatic (think Phoenix Wright : Ace Attorney) style, with large, intricate designs and minimal animation. I can also do fullscreen portrait art for lower resolution projects. Multi-angle, multi-scene animated cutscenes not a problem, and I'm happy to script all the pans, movements and actions in these too, having a strong coding background.

Chara art for me is usually a huge, very time-consuming undertaking, so it'd have to be for the right project.

Music
I've been a singer and guitarist in quite a few bands, as well as having a good working knowledge of sequencers, synths and the like. I mainly work in alt-rock, electro, synth-rock, shoegazer, trip-hop and acoustic styles, although I'm happy to give anything else a shot. I can release MIDI or fully digital MP3/OGG files to suit the project. This isn't anywhere near as time-consuming as graphics work, as I can work on music in any spare moment of free time, so I should be able to help out a lot more projects.

Proofreading/Script Editing
I'm happy to help out here if need be for any English-language projects, having a fairly strong background in writing for numerous online and offline publications.

And that's about it. If you're interested, you know where to find me

Cheers,
Cheeba

Recently, it's been Phoenix Wright:Ace Attorney. Easily the best adventure game I've played in years, it's just utterly wonderful in every way. It makes me smile just thinking about it

Other recent faves would be Mario Kart DS, Project Rub and Animal Crossing : Wild World. Far as I'm concerned, nobody seems to even come close to Ninty for producing fun, quality games by the cartload, especially in the last year or two.

As for all-time faves, there's System Shock 2, Anachronox, Full Throttle, Sam And Max Hit the Road, The Secret Of Monkey Island and The Longest Journey.

Good taste, that man! or fish...

a few of my favourites:

"Only Shallow" - My Bloody Valentine (personal fave Irish band )
"Cannonball" - The Breeders
"Safari" - The Breeders (again)
"Seether" - Veruca Salt
"I Feel You" - Depeche Mode
"Falling Away" - The Like
"Love in a Trashcan" - The Raveonettes
"Murdermile" - The Kills
"Leave them All Behind" - Ride
"Sad and Lonely" - Secret Machines
"Agenda Suicide" - The Faint
(EDIT: I can't BELIEVE I forgot this next one, it's probably my all-time favourite song)
and
"Baby You Should Know" - Joy Zipper

And a couple hundred more absolute classics, but we'll stop there. It's not so much a problem of what's a truly great tune, more a case of how to narrow it down.

For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, here's a rather infamous account of life working for those scum (who, me? biased? ):

http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

It's also worth reading the replies to that, where countless other developers chime in with their opinions on EA and many other high end companies in the industry. It's certainly an eye-opener for any wannabe developers out there, I know it was for me.

And MrColossal, great to hear that all companies aren't like that and there's good experiences to be had as well (I bloody hope so, I'm a games development student).

This is shaping up to be very impressive indeed. Love the portraiture, not to mention the little bit of fan service on the heroine's pic (coming from me, that's a compliment, believe me ). Best of luck guys!

Looking forward to this one. The graphics have a real charm to 'em

Cool, hope I don't disappoint ya there . Although the visual style's very anime, the characters and writing are going to be much more western in style.

Sorry for the lack of updates over the last couple of days, I've currently got my head buried in FL Studio, working on the soundtrack. So far it's been coming on pretty well, I'll have some updates on that front within the next day or two so you can judge for yourselves. As I always wanted the game to have a full soundtrack and don't fancy getting sued, I'm writing some original songs to go with the actual ingame score.

And afflict, yeah, you've got a point about those legs, the feet don't quite sit right . It'll be fixed one way or another for the first release demo.

There's a place for fan-games certainly, and like other have said they're a great stepping stone to bigger and brighter things, but I tend to find them more restrictive than anything. I'd outlined a couple of fangame ideas for my first AGS game, but ended up working on something entirely original instead.

http://www.the-underdogs.info/game.php?name=Dreamweb
Well worth a look if you've got a little free time.

Birdseye view? As far as I recall, there weren't any adventure games(don't count Indy, MI and SQ, they weren't ALL birdseye) that used that king of style.

Well, I remember the excellent DreamWeb used that style of overhead view, but it's about the only one I can think of. Fantastic game too.

This looks kinda intriguing, look forward to seeing how it turns out mate.

My Gimp costume's in the wash, I'm afraid

Update time again, with a rough mix of the title theme for you to check out. As usual, check the bottom of the top post for more.

Like they say, it's all a matter of taste. I swear by Paint Shop Pro 9 myself, it's powerful, user-friendly, and most importantly cheap as hell . You can even pick up PSP 8 these days for around a tenner, and it's practically identical in its functionality. I'm also a bit of a rare case, in that I started off as a photoshop user, but migrated over to psp and never looked back.

Phew, just had a narrow escape there. Was working through a new scene when my external HD crashed, and stayed crashed :'(. I lost a massive amount of old artwork and music, but luckily I'd backed up my AGS project folder (including all raw images and everything) only a couple of hours before on a hunch, so only one short scene was lost, which should be easily enough replaced

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to have a fit in the direction of the swines who sold me a bad HD...

You forgot Penny and Casey Carlysle

New Trachtenberg's the name of the city they're going to, and yeah, it's a reference to the lovely Michelle. Sorry to disappoint you, but na, she's not in it... I think. Plot details are a little sketchy on the specifics, as I like to go with the flow of the story and see where the characters take themselves. And I haven't ruled out a faux-cameo or two, they can be a laugh when they fit the story.

Coincidentally, before I started work on StarTrippers, I was planning on a Buffy adventure game centered around the continuing adventures of Dawn, but it never got further than a few concept sketches. And no, it didn't have any porn in it . It's not ruled out, just on the back burner for now.

@Barbarian: Yeah, that's all my own art, scanned in from sketches and digitally coloured in PSP. At the minute I'm learning my way around a few old animation shortcuts to keep the filesizes from getting too outrageous, but there's definitely going to be a decent volume of in-engine cutscenes, multi-angle scenes etc. I must be some kind of masochist . I gotta say, working on such a huge project does wonders for improving drawing and animation skills, I've shook off a lot of rust since I started, and learned a few tricks I could never have done before that.

Thanks to everybody for the cool welcome and great feedback so far, I can tell I'm going to like it here

[StarTrippersEpisode One: Our Friends Electric (working title)]

StarTrippers
Episode One: Our Friends Electric (working title)

Working status:
- graphics 39%
- puzzles 45%
- scripting 60%
- sound fx 20%
- soundtrack 20%

Devteam: 1 (Me, a penniless games development degree student. Hello)
Members needed?: Not at the moment, I'll wait until the demo's finished until I see about expanding or not. However, if you're interested in helping, drop me a PM!

Plot:
Meet Jack. Sometime courier, occasional bounty hunter and all around roister-doisterer. Together with his best mate Cipher, an AI construct hooked into the system substructure of the good ship Shutterbug. Which brings us to the ship, an old ex-military scout/light recon interstellar craft that's seen considerably better days.

We join our intrepid crew as they return to New Trachtenberg for a simple little deal with the local lowlife (sorry, 'indigenous entrepreneurs'). However, as with most things these days, simple little deals never quite seem to work out that way for Jack and Cy.

Latest blurbage:
Okay, I've got a feeling this might be a controversial one, I was a little hesitant about posting status on this one at all due to some of the more 'colourful' subject matter. It's a sci-fi comedy adventure, with some occasional swearing and mild violence, but it also contains quite graphic sex scenes in its current alpha build. These might be toned down a little for public demo/release (most likely there'll be two versions for the less open-minded), but it's always kinda ticked me off that people go up in arms over two people having consensual sex in a game, when you can run around in counterstrike shooting people in the head all day and nobody bats an eyelid. But that's a soapbox I'll save for another time.

Progress is coming along nicely so far, slowly but surely, mainly thanks to the massive amount of hi-res graphical elements and animations needed for the project. It'll be played mainly in the first person, with occasional cutscene interludes played out in a cinematic style to give things a little more life. And thanks to some really quite spectacularly messy scripting, I've implemented a weapon targeter, which can punch location-specific decals into the background and the like (metal dents, glass cracks etc). I'm a musician as well, so further along the line I'll be adding an optional custom soundtrack, but that can wait until the final stages.

I realise I'm probably aiming way too high for my first project, especially for a one-man team, but so far so good. I'll keep you all posted with updates and a demo as soon as they're available. With any luck, the demo should be forthcoming in the next week or two.

Some screens from the first finished scenes. I've edited these for content, but let me know if any need removed.





You can start screaming 'PERV!' at me now if you like

UPDATE (5th May): FINALLY finished a ship design I'm happy with. Here's pics of the ShutterBug's exterior, and a close-up of the pinup on the ship's nose (well, you GOTTA have one of those ). These scenes are all taken from the intro:




On a technical note, the larger pics here are actually fullsize shots, as the game's being developed in 640x480. Partly to save on filesize, and also because some of the tricks using alpha channels and fullscreen background animation would've caused massive slowdown on less powerful machines.

Oh, and If anyone wants uncensored sample images from the racier scenes, PM me. You're only getting a couple though, no point spoiling the game for yourselves

UPDATE (7th May): Finished a rough mix of the intro theme. You can download it and check it out for yourselves here (1.84MB 192kbps Mp3). It's a rough mix at the mo, but let me know what ya think. I'll probably overdub some ambient live guitar along with the synths before release, to give it a bit more depth.

UPDATE (12th May): Just a quick piccy for you all, just so you know I'm not dead yet (it's worse, EXAM time ). It's a pic of new Trachtenberg, again from the intro. Ingame it's a slow pan across the city, but you'll have to make do with a screengrab 'til the demo hits in a few weeks . Also, I finished a couple more tunes, but I'll leave those until I'm a little more conscious. Anyway, here's the latest shot:



UPDATE (29th May): After a brief hiatus due to exams, work continues on graphics and scripting. There's still a massive amount to get done, but it's slowly starting to come together, especially now the story's a lot more near completion. Anyway, new screens time, first one's a better pic of Jack (having some trouble with a little local colour), and the second's a pic of NTPD receptionist Becca:

Hi there. My name's Joe, but most people just call me cheebs or cheeba, use whatever suits ya. Toyed around with AGS on occasion over the last couple of years, but never got much going beyond a rubbish first room with big purple mask-lines everywhere . That's set to change now though, as I'm heavily into development on my new game StarTrippers, and hope to have the first episode ready within the next few weeks (or I could be a realist and change that to within a month or two).

Hi all, look forward to seeing you all on the boards!