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You could put up speakers in the ceiling corners rather than a stereo next to the table. Or maybe a guy playing violin would be better for this type of restaurant.
Concerning the floor, if you're going for a carpet look, select the entire floor surface and add noise (given you use Photoshop or something that supports this method). If you don't overdo it, it's a neat carpet look, for cheap!

I really like the BG, looks cool. I've always been a sucker for these carribean settings.
And if I may nitpick, you could blur the frontmost table a bit. Gives it more depth sense. I'm just in love with special effects...

Looks good, I like it. Great use of lighting.
Try adding maybe some rubble or scorch marks to the buildings and the street.
And the perspective bothers me a bit. I can't quite put my finger on it...

Even though I may not yet be in full right to respond to this game *cough*, I think it's great! Looks good, plays well, and very funny. Good job.

Yeah I agree that straighforward ripping isn't really the way to go. You should add something to it.

Personally, I am a Google whore. I envision a room in a certain way, from a certain angle, then I try to find a close-matching picture on the internet. That works quite well. Then I totally repaint it and add objects and effects. Because they are pictures taken by normal people, there is no copyright issue. If I can't find something matching, I look through my games library, mostly Max Payne 2, and try to find something like what I was searching for. Then I detach the camera and take a screenshot. I then trace all lines from the screenshot and repaint it, as I described above. For me, it's perfect.

Ok, so here I am again! It's been a slow period, but now that I have a week off I've resumed work. So far I've done 2 new rooms, and I'm reworking a lot of sprites.

Here's some eyecandy:

I improved on the Frank sprite to make him look less like a... well, a nervous actor comes closest to describing it I guess. You know what I mean.


INDEED! The chokehold! Interrogate this half-witted guard to progress in the game.

Looks good bro, hope you get it finished. Demo is enjoyable, great background music, and I love that GUI!

Yeah, the syncing might not have been the big problem, but I'm not very good at animating so, for me, it would have been a frustrating journey. Finding creative workarounds seems to be more rule than exception in my case. :

Thanks for pointing out those commands though, they'll come in handy in general development.

Not me. I thought of that first, but having the guard fit into the hole in the player sprite is a harder job than cutting the players arms off and including them in the guard sprite. Sync-wise.

[EDIT]
The more and more I think about this, the harder it's getting. It all seemed so beautiful in my mind, but executing it is turning out to be more trouble than it's worth...

BUT, not to fear. I've devised an easy and about-as-good replacement. I'm gonna make the whole animation thing a 3-frame comic cutscene. No tiresome animation hassle, just a quick cutscene that shows the player grabbing the guard. Then it'll go back to the game, and there will be the characters in grabbed pose for the conversation. Then another cutscene where the player knocks the guard out. It'll be a LOT less frustration for me, and I'll stay true to the comic it was inspired on. Fantastic.

I think the best voice acting I've heard was in Broken Sword. The first time I played was the BS2 demo, then BS1 on the GBA. Once I finally got hold of the full pc version I was blown away by the fact the game had voices. It added so much more depth to the game.

Yeah i was thinking about that aswell. It'd require an insane amount of syncing, but it's possible. Also, I'd have to place some parts of the player character on the guard sprite, because I can't  have one arm go behind the sprite and one in front of it.

There goes my spare time... :

I'm not really sure where to post this, so this seems like the most risk-free board for it.

Anyway, I'm working on my game again, and I need some help with an advanced interaction. Here's the deal:

The player has been captured by mercenaries and locked in an office building. He manages to escape the room and ends up in the hallway where a guard is working on a vending machine. The player wants to interrogate then take him out. Kinda like MGS/Splinter Cell.
I plan to use this interaction only once.
So when I use the interact cursor on the guard, I want the player character to walk up and grab him from behind. Then, I want to have a conversation with him. After that he has to knock him out.

What would be the best approach to do this? I was thinking I create an animation of him grabbing the guard, and hide/remove the player character and the guard when it plays. Then, after the animation is done playing, I place a seperate character of the player  holding the guard for the conversation, and again an animation to knock the guard out. Then I unhide the player char and place the knocked-out guard as new character. I'll have to do an insane amount of syncing, but it just might work...

That looks awesome! I wish I was that good with a tablet...

Thanks Splat44, implemented your idea!

just a heads-up: I re-did the site design. Now in slick metal style! It's not finished yet, I plan to add some more goodies and eyecandy, but it's better than the black typed layout.

I hope to resume work on the game as soon as possible, I just haven't had much time lately...

http://www.dinerdate.tk
I say no more...

Well ok: Rush Limbaugh.


...
Wow, that was completely random.

Anyway,
About the actual comic, I'd have to say meh. Where's the punchline? Or was it so hilarious Ben Croshaw (whoever he is. I'm Dutch :) died an agonising death after laughing really hard about it, so that someone had to slip in an awkward placeholder until the original punchline had been retrieved. I mean, looking at Ben Croshaw just lying there would have exactly been fun either. Although we can never be sure.

I like the old man comic though. Except for the fact that it's grossing me out right now.

Excuse my random and somewhat cryptic post. I'm strange.

Well I'm not that familiar with all the coding stuff in AGS (yet), so I personally will wait and see what Chris comes up with in due time, now that I know the issue is on the to-do list.

As for an easier work-around, the look responses for the Inv items are in  the Global Messages. This way it displays on top of the GUI. And I changed the Y value of my pointer overlay a little so most of it comes out above the GUI when I move my mouse over an item. I've only got the top row filled with items so far, so it's not that bad. It'll take a long while before I release my game anyway, so I'm sure the issue will be solved by then.

Hey man, the downloadlink is dead. And the pics you posted are aswell.

Yeah, I agree on the castle. It needs more size. At least make it broader. It somehow reminds me of some sort of elvish treehut. Except it grey. And not quite tree-like at all. Anyway...

That...thing under/next to the bridge, what is it? Is it some sort of Zeppelin holding the island up or something? I love those clouds though, they're cool.

Oh, and before you color in a pencil sketch, try adjusting the levels, or the contrast. I don't know how that works in GIMP, but in photoshop it works quite well. It mainly blacks out the lines, creating a more pen-like drawing. Also, clear up any noise from the paper and line-bleeds, as they tend to create havoc when you unleash the paint bucket on it. For instance at the bridge and the castle.

Otherwise it looks pretty good, keep working on it.

I have the exact same problem.
I don't see how a text area can solve this problem, since the text is displayed normally, but the GUI is covering it. Mind you, this doesn't just apply to the speech text, it also applies to the overlay on my mouse pointer showing objects' names, and thus here the names of the inventory items.
And I didn't create a new GUI, I modified the graphics on the default Inventory GUI.

What makes a custom (Inventory) GUI different from the normal GUI that text appears behind it?


P.S. I apologise in advance, I know this thread is old, but it's the only one dealing with this problem and I haven't been able to find a solution any other way.

Runaway never ran on my comp. Somehow I always got a black screen.

That guard in the first screen looks like he was modeled after the bodyguard of Conroy Bumpus from S&M:HTR. Pretty good.

The perspective is a bit off though, you should experiment with that a little. In the room from the first screenshot you could try to make the forward scaling factor a bit bigger. The guard is as big as the guy in the cell, while clearly that guy is further away. Second screen is good, but the character in the 3rd screen seems a bit too small aswell. The backgrounds are really nice though, I like that sketchy style. Makes it harder to properly define walk-behinds though. And that dog is cool.