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I'm working my way through it and it is rockin'. Hard as hell but it's like the classic arcade games where bit by bit, as you play it again and again, you get better and better. I love going back through the early levels that gave me such trouble originally and beating them with a perfect score. I also love how some of the abilities you buy are really ESSENTIAL while others seem cool at first but then it turns out there's not a whole lot of use for them (I haven't yet hit a situation where hanging from the ceiling was super essential).

Some of the controls could use a tiny bit of refinement (I find myself cursing at the character for doing things that I didn't tell it to do or wasn't trying to tell it to do) but man, it is one polished, fun product.

As for those who find it too hard... aww, that's so sad. Maybe we can get you a copy of Mixed -up Mother Goose instead.

The problem with the centaur is that with human legs in the front, it looks like she just incidentally has a horse butt attached to her rearâ€"like it is some sort of horse costume gone wrong. That's a little odd and certainly not what people think of when they think of centaurs.

hi all can some one tell me how do you import your own charaters i have tried with no luck

                 thanks

What exactly have you tried? Have you gone over the tutorial?

Erwin -- Army is fine, close enough!

(newspapers newspapers newspapers)

I _tried_ to make newspapers but I just couldn't come up with something that looked plausibly like a newspaper at that resolution. I guess I could try again. But I think I'm done with that one for now. It was just too hard to put in the kind of "text plus a graphic" appearance that newspapers have when I only had a 8X12 pixel area to use for it.

OK, I think I'm about done with this.

A few last tweaks:





1. added some typewriters (I had been meaning to do this...)
2. extended it all the way across the frame on the left as well (that one pixel line wasn't really doing anything productive).

Note that in the actual game, the second hand of the clock will slowly rotate as time goes by. You know, for effect and all. Just for fun.

Have you tried running it in full-screen mode? I occasionally had some mouse-sync issues running Parallels on my OS X machine, but in full-screen it always righted itself.

OK, I'm back in action!

Here's my current version of the scene. It is expanded, colors are a bit desaturated (put a semi-transparent layer of gray over the whole thing), some more things on the desks and the walls, etc. Thoughts are appreciated!

The colors could also easily be more desaturated, but it all depends on which mood you're going for - I'm imagining a James Ellroy sort of story, so these suggestion may be way off.

Haha -- are my interests so transparent? The whole thing is meant to be very Ellroy-esque in a very direct way (much of the plot is just copped from taking various elements from different Ellroy and changing them around a bit, mashing them together in unfamiliar ways).

I've been bowled over with ("real") work this last couple of weeks but next week I'll post the new version for comments. I'm expanding it horizontally quite a bit and playing with a few things, having quite a bit of fun with it, but it's only partially complete for the moment and I'm going to be out of town on official business for the rest of the week.

But these comments have been immensely helpful so far and have been good stimulus for my own thinking on the scene and graphical style of the game in general. So thank you all!

Tell you the truth the room looks just like the staff room in my old school (the teachers would all be so busy walking around, grading papers, etc)

In fact, the guy in the scene looks like a teacher, I'd think this was a story about supernatural phenomenon happening at school or something.

Haha, well that's fine. He's supposed to look like that. In the game you actually play as two different characters -- one a relatively weak and unimpressive detective, the other a rather imposing and dangerous seeming mob heavy. And as you can probably guess, in the end the question of who is really tougher, meaner, more moral, becomes a little confusing -- it's a narrative about deceptive apperances, in a sense. So looking like a schoolteacher is really IDEAL in this case!

I'm trying to think of details that would make it more clear it was a room in the LAPD. I just doubt they'd be putting up signs that say, "Hey, this is the LAPD!" From what I can tell most squad rooms are pretty straightforward and uninteresting looking. Which again is fine narrative-wise.

Yeah, he's got pretty wide legs. It looks like a strut. Real people don't usually walk with very wide legs, and don't angle their feet so widely. Personally I think it looks basically right if your character is climbing a ladder with their legs; when stationary it looks a little strange, but when actually animated (and they are moving) it looks right.

A few quick thoughts:

*I roll pretty wide with my monitor (MacBook) and when maximized the black borders show, since the background doesn't repeat at all. Not sure if that's a real issue or not but thought you'd like to know.

*Verdana for your site name is gonna look ugly no matter what you do. Verdana is one ugly font when it is made big. It works well for small text, but not big text. I recommend choosing something else. I'd probably do the site title in Photoshop so I had more options.

*You should make the top image blend into the overall background better so it doesn't look like it's just plopped on top of it. Or add a more defined and purposeful border to it.

*You can get around the no-javascript bit by having a default image which an onload() function changes to a random one. Better than having it not work with IE (which is 90% of the browser market).

*The little arrows you use for bullet points are odd with their little square backgrounds. I'd work on those a little.

Otherwise things look pretty good to me!

I like all the little details! I'm wondering, though, why you don't use the entire screen. Why that black border around everything?

It's meant to be something of a letterbox effect. I might try enlarging in on the horizontal axis, though. In any case, the GUI is a Sierra-AGI style text parser (bottom of screen at all times), so it needs to be up a little bit on that border so that the text parsing is always at a comfortable place for the eyes (e.g. not at the very bottom of the monitor).

Sparky: there aren't different perspectives in the pic anymore and there's no vanishing point.
The left wall is a bit off though; the top isn't drawn at a 45° angle and most of the bottom was shifted down a pixel, probably unintentionally.

Hmm, yeah, maybe I'll play with that.

I've noticed this just yet: the blue part of the flag should take up about one quarter. It's as high as the top seven stripes (of 13) and half as wide as the flag.

It's actually not quite as wide as half the flag (if you Google Image it you'll see it is a little over a third). In any case the flag is, other than the portrait of Ike, the only thing I "traced" in this scene (I couldn't manage drawing either from scratch and having it look semi-realistic), so that's actually how it was in the original (compared with this, which is what it was based on).

I think it looks pretty good, actually. A G-shaped rose is a very good choice. I would AVOID the temptation to make it blood red though -- it'll look too much like other logos (here I'm thinking of the Grateful Dead in particular, who use a rose motif at times as well).

You'd want to re-do it as a vector in the end, of course (in this case I don't think the pixel-chic works well).

Thanks for the comments!

Here is the new version with the corrected back table:





I'm not too worried about the overlays in part because the motions of the player are very constrained in my game -- all of the walking directions are given via scripting (not through mouse clicks or arrow keys) so there are a limited number of pre-defined paths. It is a typing and thinking game, not a clicking and walking game.

Looks ok to me, maybe the perspective is a bit weird, but I can't tell why.

Yeah, it doesn't really use a common vanishing point and all that. It's meant to be somewhat isometric though some things use somewhat different vanishing points than others (compare the desks to the table against the wall).

I'm not sure if that's a problem or not, though. Part of me feels like in a game like this keeping perfect perspective is not totally necessary, but another part of me isn't sure if it will turn the player off or not. The question as I see it is whether that will distract from gameplay or not..

Looks ok to me, maybe the perspective is a bit weird, but I can't tell why.

One more thing - I wouldn't know that it is an LAPD, if you wouldn't written it. It just does not look like LAPD office to me. But, you know, I do not even know how it looks in real life...

I don't think they have/had LAPD written on it in big letters, but in any case, it will be clear in the game itself. (There will be a typewriter overlay that say something like "LAPD, Detective Bullpen, 2:10 am" or whatever.)

I don't know how to help you on the perspective, but I do want to say that the perspective and color choice on the, err, trash can, makes it look remarkably like, err, something else. You might want to make it a different color! 

You don't need to make an in-game object for something unless you want it to disappear, move, or some other visual change. If the visuals stay the same, just make it part of the background and add a hotspot.

Hello! I am working on my first adventure game. I don't have a lot of experience with pixel art, so I wanted to get some feedback early on. This is pretty much the setup of my first room of the game. The game itself is going to be set in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, and has a purposely muted palette.

The goal of the graphics is something that evokes the simplicity of the early Sierra games but with a somewhat enlarged palette and much richer scenes. A direct nod to Trilby's Notes is order too.

Anyway, let me know what you think on any aspect of it. I've been staring at the same scene for about two weeks (not constantly, obviously!) so I'd like a little outside feedback, a fresh viewing.

This particular room is the detective's squad room in the LAPD. That's one of player characters on the right (the game has you switching between player characters at different parts in the game).