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Don´t give up, check out the tuts, buy a sketchpad, look at your favourite games/illustrations/comics and try to emulate the styles.  If you know how the screens should look like, look at how the others have drawn the objects you want to have on your picture. If you have at least a tiny bit of a talent and a lot of patience, you will consequently come up with your own style and you will get better every picture.

It´s probably going to be a long run, so don´t let this discourage you. And remember, tutorials will help you a little to make your pictures look less crappy while to practise wil help a lot...

Regards
jaz

EDIT: I´ve just read your post. Don´t be shy and post it. You will see that the people wont tear your work into pieces but will try to give you a hand...

It´s hard to remember which was the first computer game I´ve ever played, but I guess it was something on my friend´s ZX Spectrum in the middle of 80´s, but I can tell you for sure which one was the greatest....

MANIC MINER!!!!

Yes, brilliant graphics, cutting edge animation and superb sound effects, what else to say.
But maybe waiting for any game to load was even more thrilling... With my buddy´s crappy tape recorder to reach the title screen was a victory already. I guess we didn´t even breathe while loading.
Then another friend of mine got a C64 and that was just awesome! My Commodore favourites were Buggy boy, Gyrus and Wizzard of Wor against opponent.
Then the abovementioned first friend got a PC XT with Prince of Persiia... yay!!! And Test Drive!!! Sweet.
By that time I was really fed up that I don´t have ANY computer, but I had to wait untill late 1992 when finally my parents decided to buy a computer, shiny new 33Mhz 386SX with 2 Megs of RAM. And I remember that it came with two games... One was from iD software and the other from EA.... Yes, you guessed right, Commander Keen and Zany Golf    Both in EGA, which was almost an insult to my top of the line 512 kB video card.

Just to add: first games played with soud card: Lotus Espirit Turbo Challenge 3 and NHL 93 -  Incredible experience.

First adventure game: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis! The best adventure game ever!!!  (at least for me) It took me whole summer holidays to beat it.

Nowadays, the games just aren´t what they used to be when we were young, you know?

Hey people, look at this!



I guess CJ should better explain what´s going on inside this suspiciously looking warehouse...

Hi Tomus,
methink that the pictures are quite good but I really must say that the character sticks out like a sore thumb
He just doesn´t fit in.  Throw in a few more muscles, maybe. He looks like undernourished ninja...

Ermm... but otherwise good stuff, you sure know how to make good rendered BGs. Maybe you should really consider moving to first person.

But WTF why bitching about somebody´s style, do what you wanna do, you´re doing this for fun after all, am I right ? And I think it´s gonna be fun first person or not.

Laters.

Very, very nice pictures.
Good use of colours, that captures the autumn athmosphere.
Only I would add some joints/cracks between the beams of timbered houses and some shading on cobblestones to make the pictures more vivid.

Looking forward to see more coming!!

Great website you have there!

I find it easy to navigate and artistically polished.
I really dig your art. Again I have to say the word ... polished. Clean crisp lines. Not a stroke wasted. And yes - elegant might suit your style as well. The sixties influence is evident and I think it´s great.  It somehow reminds me my childhood (especially the black and white sketches). Not that I was born in sixties, of course, but  a long time ago, when I was a kid I found some kids magazines from sixties in our local library and I was hooked, mostly because of the art. Lovely memories. (except from I have returned them long after due date and I had to pay something that equaled a fortune for me at the time... I was scared they could even call cops on me )

Umm, where we were? Ahh, yes.... good job Igor. Double thumbs up!

Hi Opulent,

I´m glad you found your guy. Well, I made a sketch of the BG you suggested - the record label office - but it´s useless now. Anyway I really do think that you found the right person.

Good luck with your project.

Hi Opulent,

dunno if my post offended you, if so I do apologise.
But anyway, at least this discussion started to roll

Eh, what I wanted to say is that I have downloaded the BigCreak tracks from Sonicbids and I loved it.

Also you sounded like some PR guy from a big record company but as I see now, you are kinda indie too! And those guys sure have talent.... so why not to help ´em, right?

Anyway, if you are willing to cut the number of BGs and if you like my style - I can make it more cartoony for sure - let me know.

Also it would be nice if you could post some description of BGs, hotspots, objects and stuff, you know.

Personally I think that what puts most of the people off is the deadline.
What are you asking for is a game which should feature 17 high quality backgrounds and 19 characters including four player chars. That pretty much equals one third of a full commercial adventure game. And all this is supposed to be done within les than two months.

And as scotch has already mentioned, you want the people to make this one for free or just for pleasure of creating something worthy.
But hey: aren´t you paid for what you do at Opulent Records? I know this may sound a little bit harsh, but you have to understand that most of the AGSers make games just for fun and they don´t expect any profit for themselves or anybody else. And on the other hand they don´t have to care much about deadlines or technical side of their products.

Your project demands both: to be done ASAP and to be high level.
In other words, the conditions are like ones of the commercial sphere.

So, my conclusion is if you want the game to be created, you have to offer the people more than free tickets and probably be more realistic and cut the plot a fair bit to lets say 5 - 7 BGs. I see that four characters seem to be inevitable, but there could be for example just one puzzle for each.  

Ermm... anyway, if you´re interested, you can check out some of my old work here( it´s somewhere in the critics lounge):

http://www.agsforums.com/yabb/index.php?board=4;action=display;threadid=8978

I´m currently working on my project, but maybe I could contribute somehow.

Laters

Hmm,
it´s always nice to meet a fellow AGSer... I´m Czech too, cheers

*jaz gulps from his emergency beerbottle he always carries with him, like   every Czech*

Looks promising, even though I think that only Czechs could really appraise the subtle humour that would inevitably be connected with game that is based upon hop fields brigade

Anyway this game should rock.

*Moral* As I found out, you guys that make this game are only 16 and 17!!!
How the hell were you able to get the beer at Knezeves pub!!!

Laters

PS: to Minimi: Next time get a Budweiser/Budvar (the original Czech one, not the American shit) or Pilsner Urquell. Not that I would have anything against Staropramen, of course.

Wow,
my very first thread and it became a hot topic!!!
(sure it is because of Andail´s plea to wait a little before putting anything on internet. I´ve waited for seven years before showing my work to public )
Anyway, thanks for everybody´s positive comments (especially Hadas´s ) I didn´t think the last one was much good but taking a second look even in reduced color it looks OK. It encoureges me  to start my gamemaking career .

To GarageGothic: I´m planning to make a game. That means I will have to do some backgrounds. In this case I´m maybe going to do a tut on some of them but again, it all has been said thousand times before and shown by far better artists, There are some tuts by Bill Tiller on internet for example and this guy cannot be beaten IMO .

And yes, the blue light on the underside of the cliff was of course LucasArts inspired. More by Full Throttle I think since I´ve never played The Dig (shame, shame ).

The screenies look quite good and cartoony but I think that just a little bit of shading would make them even better. I guess you should try it 'cause I see a great potential in them. I'm looking forward to a game.

Well,
downloaded it... played it.... liked it much.
I was impressed that something like this could be done within less than two weeks. You sure seem to have great gamemaking skills!

Double thumbs up foz!

BTW: check your PM

I agree with remixor, It would help to shorten the torso, but just a little bit because I think that he, as a diver, has to be skinny. I think you have captured the personality of character very well, since he really looks like a guy that spent most of his life somewhere by the sea. Actually my first idea after I saw the picture and before I read the post was that he looked like an old surfer
To sum it up, I think that the character is great and you should keep the style.

Hey,
thank for your feedback everybody.

Erm, here´s one more pic to show. It´s not a very good one, but it´s a pure nostalgia for me because this is the very first hicolor pic I´ve ever done. Before that I was working in low color and my favourite tool was Autodesk Animator Pro. It was great for animating but I used to use it for BGs as well. Then a friend of mine called saying "Hey I just got something you have to see!!" This "somethig" was Fractal Design Painter program. I was instantly amazed by it´s possibillities and I started to play with it at once. I spent about an hour exploring the program and this was the outcome:



As you can see it has as much colors as possible since it was my first encounter with 16 million color palette and lightsources are weird.

As I said I drew this in well under an hour (it´s not very original though, I remember that I saw a cliff like that in some comics before) and I was like: "man, It´s cool! I can make the backgrounds in no time!! Of course I found out soon that it´s not that easy to make a real one:-)

That´s it.

BTW: I repeat if anybody is interested in making a game using the African BGs, go ahead. I could even draw one or two more in this style if needed and design some characters too. (As an excercisse for my planned game)

See ya!

That´s amazing!!!

I wish I could draw characters like that.

Keep up the good work!!




What´s the technique BTW?

That was a good point MrColossal
it´s one of flaws I was talking about in one of my previous posts.
It is clearly visible for example in the gate/entrance in the first picture and on shadows casted by those boards in the second. But my point was also to capture the lazy atmosphere of African early afternoon, when the sun is blazing the air is hot and it seems like the light is coming from everywhere and there are no shadows at all. I guess that the hicolor veersions shows it better. (But as I said, I agree that the objects should have some credible shadows anyway, because a proper shading contributes greatly to the atmosphere of ANY picture.)

Hello again,

nice to hear you like these...

Keiko: Sure I´m going to give the AGS a try, it´s a great engine and since i saw the number of great games made with it I´m totally amazed by possibilities it offers. One of main reasons our project had been cancelled were complications in a way to produce a powerfull bug-free engine. But still I think there is a lot of scriptwizzards around that could do the programming waaay better than me.

Jannar85: No, hopefully I´m not going to be just hit and run kind of a member. I´ve been peeking on the forums for about two months, have read all threads that seemed interesting to me. (Pretty much everything and I found out that the atmosphere in the community is great! So finally I decided to join.

As for the other question, I´m not going back on THIS project NOW. Sure it would be great to finish it since I put a great effort into it, but I think that due to lack of my spare time I would not be able to make it in size and quality I want (artwise, not to mention programing)  and that would be a pitty since I think that the story I wrote deserves it.

However, I AM working on a game!! I aim for something smaller as a test, something I could manage to do. I don´t have any backgrounds finished so far, but I´m working on plot and puzzles and I can say, that I´m about 90% done. In fact It´s a resurrection of an even older project (from 1995 ). I found the "screenplay" on the backup CD as well and I was surprised that it was almost finished, however it was meant to be just first part of an intended game. But it could IMO make a nice medium game to test skills and technique on before going on something bigger.  (Of course I would need to find somebody who could take care of technical part).

No graphics are finished so far but these will be in a little different style, since I will probably go the classic way: concept, sketch, scan, outline, color and using layers. Hopefully these will be a bit better than the present ones.

But anyway, I´m not going to announce anything before there will be something to show since I´m aware that there were heaps of promising projects going nowhere and I´ve been through a couple myself when I was younger

Eggie, Layaboogie: yes, this is an pre-AGS bluecup that was meant to serve the whole community. Then the idea was dismissed and everybody got his own nice litttle one.
And for the number of colors used: it wasn´t intentional, I just wanted to reduce the filesize since I´m currently on laptop/cellphone GPRS connection. I think that these look much better in hicolor, but every pic has about  1 Meg ant it´s a real pain in the ass to upload them in this quality not to mention displaying them on a forum.

Bingo!!!
It works!!
Thanks GinnyW, you can remove the pictures from your post (it was nice from you to "host" them for a while)

As for the technique: there is nothing special. These are 100% computer drawn (just because of the fact that i didn´t have a scanner back in 1997) and therefore no concept art was used.

I was using a technique which is similar to one some use for making grafitti.
I started with a spray tool, yellow color, to sketch rough outlines of objects. Then I was playing with these to establish tem and make them solid and colored. (also with spray tool)
With this done, I just patiently colored the picture, surprisingly with spray tool (and with some slight touches of dodge/burn)

So as you can see, there is nothing special to write a tutorial about.
I was using Fractal design Painter program, but as you see, any would do.
Yes and no tablet was used, just mouse.

However, I was planning to use a scanner for further locations (these were just test ones) and I made some concept pencil art after, but it was never used. Maybe I still have it somewhere.

Thank you very much GinnyW! Yes, the old copy/paste problem. so I  fixed the links but still I can´t post visible screenies I´ve linked to  pictures like this

(img)http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/b1.png(/img)

(Of course I used the [ ] brackets for img) and they still wont display.
What´s wrong? Anybody could help?

Thank you.