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I like the sprites a lot. They fit in quite well in the second pic, but not in the first one. I think it is the lighting that is wrong. I think it is quite important for you to use the light and scaling of your characters in a proper way to make them fit in. A semitransparent shadow would also help, I think.

I think there's one codec that plays it upside down and then uses a filter to flip it...

Is it just me or does that sound like a stupid way to implement a codec!?

[So what have you been up to all this time??]

I know it has been ages...

So what have you been up to all this time??

Since the last update, I have been busy with finishing "day 3" of the game. I have made like three or four new backgrounds, tons of animation, a whole new puzzle sequence (complete with all graphics and animation), three dialogs, rewritten several dialogs and also made a lot of bug testing. The thing which has taken most time has been to put dialogs together so that Tom is not aware of things he should not yet know, and also to make him stop asking questions which are outdated (because you have already finished those puzzles). It gets complicated since you will be able to meet the same characters during several days, in which the current event change drastically. But in the end it is all coming together nicely. And it will be good I am sure!

And what is happening right now?

Right now I am doing the last two new characters for day three and will also script the final puzzle for this day (not much animation left to do for this one). After that day 3 is nominally finished and I will continue with the final day, which is shorter than the rest and mostly consists of the end puzzle.

So when do you expect to finish the game!?!?!?!?

Beats me! No, but seriously: I have got a (more than) full time job as well as a relationship to take care of. I work about 2-4 hours a week on Woodlands, and some weeks even less. Therefore it is difficult to put a definite release date. It will however BE released. And I long for that day. I want to play it too, you know...
Best guess: End of this year.

It might be that there are minor differences in how different programs save their targa images. If you have Photoshop, try downloading the targa fix for PS7, which changes how alpha channels are saved in the targa images. After doing that I could successfully import targa with alpha channels into AGS.

And about filesize; I don't think the game size will be bigger with TGA than with PNG since AGS converts everything you import into its own image format. So (correct me if I am wrong) it shouldn't matter what format you use.

The problem with walkto points for objects is that objects can move. And might even change animation frames. So it is difficult to set a certain point for walking to. But of course that could be left to the programmer. An object  walkto point would definitely make standard replies better for objects, since now the character will not approach the object before giving the standard remark (Ex. "There is nothing special about that."). But most often you will put a Walk() command on each non-standard interaction for the object, which gives a noticeable difference between standard and non-standard comments. A clever player could notice this and maybe draw conclusions about the importance of certain objects. Ok, I am rambling now but I hope you get my point. Geeze, I gotta go to bed! Good night!

(the cap was the hell of a lot of work)

Not to be rude, but you've got to be kidding!

I like the style though. It is stylish and simplistic. The fact that he hasn't got legs will certainly make the animation work load lighter.   Maybe a pair of stick legs would look nice. And stick arms too!

Graphics Gale normally compresses TGA images while PS7 doesn't (unless you tell it to). Could it be that AGS editor can't handle TGA compression? Otherwise I agree with Gilbot; you should use PNG instead. It is a much more modern format. The reason I use TGA is because I haven't gotten alpha channels to work properly with PNG and AGS.

I have the same problem when importing tga images saved in Graphics Gale. Is that what you've done? The problem might occur with other programs to. My solution is to open the images in Photoshop 7, and saving them again from there. Now, importing them into AGS is no problem.

Damn, Chicky! I told you not to start showing off the backgrounds I've ripped from other games!



Good job, though. Tom fits in really well.

Glad you liked the demo! Just had a look at the game executable. It is 107 MB at the moment. Geeze! And I'm not done yet!

Before I enter the silent mode again, I wish to show you all a last screenshot. This will be the last one to appear before the release of the game, so please look at it carefully.

Nice monster! Any inspiration from LBA2?

Oh, I played that game ages ago. Still have it in a box under my bed. Don't remember any monster from that game, though. It's possible however, that the inspiration has seeped from the game box into my subconscience when I have been sleeping. 

[2007-02-25: Here's a long overdue update on development:]

2007-02-25: Here's a long overdue update on development:

The last months I have done a lot. There has been nothing really major to report, which is why I've kept quiet. Put together, however, what I have done counts as a great deal. Here's a list of things done:

* One complex scene consisting of:

** A background
** Three new characters
** About 50 frames of new animations for Tom
** Several sounds

* Lots of inventory graphics. One doesn't take long to do, but I had postponed this for to long, so it took me a while.

* Sketches of four new backgrounds. I am starting on colouring these in PS next.

* Dialogs.

* Cleaned up scripted sequences, dialogs and interactions.

* Added hotspots with suitable interactions to ALL (40+) rooms. This is another thing that at first seems like a small thing. But if you don't do it right away it quickly builds up into a huge work load.

So nothing really fancy has happened, but these are things that needs to get done. And this past months have been perfect for these things, since I have had to work only short durations at a time with it.

Hope you all are still interested! 

I loved that one! It actually made me LOL! Which the other ones sadly did not. It is possible that you'd need more than 3 frames to get the timing right for simple jokes like this.

I like it very much! I actually found myself singing along near the end of the song! That means I liked it very much. Nice guitar play too, although it was not completely in beat at times.

You have a good voice, and one can hear that it has potential. But to give you some constructive criticism, it sounds like you are holding back and not singing out completely. This is actually a common mistake many people do; they try to sing with feeling so they hold back. But doing that makes your voice sound unsteady, and there are some notes that is not quite in tune. So, my advice is to always sing from your stomach, try to keep your voice as steady as possible. You will find out that you will sound better, and might even discover that you can hit a higher register than you thought you could.

I am impressed! Very high quality graphics! It all fits perfectly together!

I can't use png without causing a headache, but it's ok. Like I said, this problem has never occurred with any other tga-file, so I should be fine. Just wanted to let you know, if it was a problem with AGS. Besides, I think it would be nice to have some exception catching here, so the whole editor doesn't crash just because the import code breaks down. It should be possible, right?

Oh, don't be so hard on dear SSH. Even he has the right to make mistakes.

It happened at least two times in a row with this particular file. I haven't had any problem with importing before. I did have it opened in PS when importing, but I always have that so that shouldn't be the problem.

I have a theory though. Usually I draw my images in Gale, save them as tga, open them in PS to make alpha-channel, and then save them again from PS. This time though, I didn't actually edit and save it in PS (since there where no semitransparent areas in the pic). Could it be that Gale makes some error in the tga-save that PS can handle but AGS can't? And that a save in PS cleans up the file?

Here is the file:
http://www.fovmester.se/AGSforum/UD_side.tga

I was working as usual with AGS, and was importing sprites into the sprites editor. When I tried to import a certain tga-file, the AGS-editor crashed with the following exception message:

(Exception 0x00000000 at EIP=0x00000000,
AGSEDIT 2.72.650, SIP=26)

This happened just after I had chosen the file and clicked OK. The file can be opened by Photoshop, so there seems to be nothing wrong with the file itself. And it worked when I copied and pasted from Photoshop.