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Thanks for the response!

I gotta say... the browse through members' pages depressed me! 90% of the links I clicked on were dead (I went through and clicked randomly, since I don't know any of the nams), of those which are not about 90% of those sites seemed abandoned and aborted game projects. If there are any in particular you found useful and want to single out, that might be more helpful and less demoralizing...

I've looked at a lot of the "games in progress" posts and have found them interesting and useful.

I understand, of course, that anything like AGS is going to have a very high failure rate of completion. It is very easy to have an idea for a new game, but the nuts and bolts of it are much harder and require quite a time investment. So far I've spent about three days (only an hour or two per day, mind you) just trying to get the basic walking animations for my protagonists working so that I can start playing with them inside the game engine itself (and I'm not even really doing it totally from scratch -- I'm using previously-created designs that I liked as templates which I modify heavily to meet my needs). Lord knows how long it will take to do some sort of background -- I am endlessly impressed that people manage to come up with some really impressive settings in these games!

This is only a "technical question" in the broadest sense, but this seemed like the best place to put it.

I'm thinking about beginning an AGS project (SCIV sort of interface, nothing too technically ambitious). I know there are many tutorials and FAQs (and I have looked at a few of them, but not all of them), but I was wondering if there was a good source for sort of "general suggestions" as to beginning with AGS. What common mistakes do new people make which keeps their projects from getting off the ground? What's the best way to start off without getting burned out? What are common pit-falls? What's the secret to success?

Any thoughts anyone had, and any links they wanted to share, would be much appreciated as I think through this project and the time commitment it will involve. The sorts of questions I have are things like, "Should I bother spending a lot of time on details from the beginning, or should I put very bare-bones sprites and rooms together and then try to add detail later once the project has gotten some of its own momentum? Should I do all the room backgrounds first and then put sprites in them, or should I go about it room-by-room? Should I work on making a very polished and very short demo so that I can more quickly get feedback on the overall project?" and things like that. Obviously much of this will depend on my own work habits and preferences, but I thought some of those with a lot of experience at this might be able to share some wisdom.

I'm worried that if I start worrying about details too early on, I'll get frustrated and never finish it, but I'm also worried that it might be hard to add details later if I have neglected it too much to begin with. And I'm also worried (boy, I worry a lot) that if I make it too bare-boned from the beginning that I'll end up spending a lot of time on something unimpressive and become similarly uninspired with the project.

One general graphics question I have is if there is any common way to make the Monkey Island II-style VGA graphics. They have a very specific and stylized look to them and I haven't spent a lot of time with that particular type of computer graphics but I was curious if there was any general technique for getting that "look."

Another general question I have is how long I should expect to put into development for this. I'm thinking of something in the classic SCIV sort of approach, with a Trilby's Notes level of graphics (relatively simple and straightforward), something that would just about fit into the "long game" category but not be too long. Assuming I am not working at this full time or anything (it'll be a hobby if anything), how long should I expect this to take? A year? Longer? (Note that while I have never used AGS before, I am very familiar with similar component technologies: graphics editing/creating, scripting in general, etc., so I'm not re-inventing the wheel entirely on top of everything else.)

If this is an exceptionally common sort of thread, I very much apologize, but I didn't quite see anything in the FAQ that really addressed it very well. Thank you.