Messages

At a first glance, the appartment looks very Japanese-like, thanks to the the colors/materials chosen, the lack of furniture in the living room and the decoration hanging on the wall. Is this what you intended?

Is the thing hanging on the left wall supposed to be a window? It looks more like a picture - the frame has no depth, there is no window sill, no way to open it, no tile splitting... It doesn't seem to be dark outside, and yet there is no light coming in through the window.

Apart from the anatomy and stance issues:
- isn't the sprite too big? (113 pixels tall, that's a lot for low-res) 1/2 size reduction would save you a lot of work
- shading needs improvement - your character actually isn't shaded, he's just outlined with darker colors, they do not contribute to shape perception. Also try using a lower number of colors for the shading, but make them stand out more (enlarge the differences in value)
- clothes can tell a lot about your character. His shirt and trousers are the same colour and you can't really tell what they are. Think about what your character would be wearing and make his clothes interesting and recognisable.

What's better in the new version: you removed the black outlines
What's worse: you use tools that are better left aside

Forget about spray tools, gradient tools and other fancy effects. They don't make good backgrounds, they just make them look flat and ugly.

What matters is correct perspective, composition, careful selection of colours and putting the details just in the right place (and omitting them elsewhere).

1. Added stuff (is it a bedroom or a prison cell?)
2. Corrected the shading
3. Added depth and shading to the window (so it don't look like a painting) and lowered the bottom edge even more
4. Moved the light switch
5. Redid the bed

WonderfulÃ,  job!

I tried to make the glasses stand out more, and added a mouth.

- The legs seem to slide into position rather than move naturally (perhaps one foot should stay on the ground, and the other move; on the in-between frames the latter should be slightly off the ground)
- The top guy's torso looks like made of sliding pixel blocks - it doesn't move like a physical object, even less like a human torso (it should move much less, and it's length must be preserved, it should bend rather than stretch)
- The bottom guy's legs become thinner when he stands up

Advice:
- Use less stretch/move tools, and rather redraw by hand
- Start with keyframes. 3 keyframes should convey this movement comfortably. Don't overdo the number of in-betweens, it will only make the animation look less natural.

He looks good, but you really need to harmonize his proportions. BTW I noticed he's about 150 pixels tall... what screen resolution is he for? In 320x200, he would take up 3/4 of screen height, in 320x240 about 1/2.

In the CMI demo, Guybrush takes 1/2 of the screen height - this is an extreme, and he's very slim at the same time. So for a x240 your character is rather big, for x200 too big, on the other hand if it's for x400 or x480, it's ok.

If I were you, I'd simplify the shading - use a smaller number of more contrasting colors. Your's is unnecessarily complex, it will make difficult animating him without the animation looking "noisy".

[very much]

I played the demo and I liked it very much!

I noticed only two small technical problems:

- for some unknown reason it is necessary to switch the mouse cursor into "use" before you can select an inventory item
- in the opening menu when you click away from the floating buttons, the cursor changes from crosshair to a "look" icon

Other things noticed:
- at times I would notice by your English that you are not a native speaker (neither am I), with some misspells and a few strange-sounding expressions. But it's nothing serious and didn't spoil my gameplay.
- it might be just me, but I didn't like the Growling sprite, it just didn't look as good as the other characters
- the scene where Tom confronts the wizard would really benefit from some dramatic/evil music
- there aren't actually any puzzles in the demo. I hope to see some good puzzles in the full game!

Overall:
I love the charming and original graphics, and the fairy-tale story. I got instantly swallowed-up by the game's amazing atmosphere. Please make the full game stand up to this demo, and I'm sure it will be one of the best AGS games made so far!

Those new details looks cool. Your rendering is great, what's lacking is good perspective.

Do you realize that to be in scale to the room, beds and door, your character needs to be about 120 pixels tall in the foreground? In relation to that, the desk is vastly underscaled.

I'm working on an idea how to arrange the camera and furniture differently, I'll post it in a few minutes..

EDIT:
Another thing that I don't understand is why the holes in the wall cast shadows on the wall??


Ok, as I promised... some rushed sketches



Well, this was my first idea, I straightened up the perspective, and tried to make the room shape more interesting. The desk in the foreground bothers me, though. Without it maybe....

Second attempt:



I rearranged the furniture and used a completely different perspective... oh-oh I didn't realize it was for a Enterprise-like ship, so I made it a little green and dirty-looking.

Anyway it's generally the SHAPE of the whole room is what can make it really interesting... cubes are boring. And some pipes, conduits, (or architectural elements and displays in case of a ship with more polished design) are another thing to spice things up.

However, even in my attempts, the character needs to be scaled rather drastically across the room, which bothers me a bit. Another thing is that he might be too big when he's close to the camera... since the room is physically small it might be a good idea to scale it down, and not have it filling the whole screen.

You don't need SQL or indeed any databasing system (of course you could use that as well, but it requires learning SQL). The easiest to do is this:

Create a flat datafile that has several lines that go "name of game, amount of votes, average". Upon page load, read from that file into a STRUCT or CLASS and display the result as a HTML table. Upon receiving any votes, recalculate the averages ((cur_avg * amt_votes) + new_vote) / (amt_votes + 1), and overwrite the file with the structs in descending order of votes (sort on write is more efficient than sort on read). This is all just basic math and file IO, so you don't need to be a coding wiz to figure it.

This should work for the most part, but I'm afraid we have a race condition here. Keep in mind that if multiple users get the page at the same time, the web server will IMO launch the same script multiple times at once. The interleaved IO migh even corrupt the contents of the file in the worst case... So unless there is a file-locking feature in PHP (is there? I never heard of it) and you use it, this might go wrong once in a while.

With MySQL you can make sure the data stay consistent quite easily. It needs a very basic understanding of databases, but it's actually simpler than using file io...

[free tools]

If you want to start game programming, I don't think C++ is what you're looking for. It's a VERY complicated language with many nasty pitfalls. And it's probably not a good idea to try to learn game programming and objective programming all at the same time.

For most games, you don't really need objective programming, and an imperative language is completely sufficient (C, Pascal,...). And I think you should start with that.

The main good feature of objective programming is inheritance, and that comes in handy when you've got a complicated hierarchy of game objects (characters, tiles etc. in a RPG, for example) many of which share common behavior or properties. This is expressed naturally in terms of inheritance, but once again, this becomes an advantage only for a quite complicated game.

For making a game, you basically need a compiler + an access to the framebuffer, and keyboard input (usually provided by a game SDK).

There are some great free tools to make games.
Compilers:
Ã,  GCC - the free compiler collection, it has a C compiler, a Pascal compiler (FreePascal) etc., it's mainly Unix based, but you can install Cygwin on your windows - it's a unix-like environment running on windows, and this has a GCC port that can create native windows programs! (also there is a DOS port called DJGPP)

Game development kits/libraries: - the easiest way to access graphics in a portable and efficient manner
Ã,  SDL, Allegro - portable, run both under windows and unix
Ã,  ClanLib - another game SDK, more high-level

Under windows, graphics & sound can be accessed also directly using DirectX or GDI/WaveOut, but that is a little more complicated.

You might try to make SDL working with Borland C++ builder, but I've never tried that...

Here's a game I made, it's open source (and quite old, actually). http://blockrage.sf.net/. I wrote it in C. It uses SDL for the framebuffer and keyboard input, but generally could work with any similar library (as it uses just the general framebuffer). I developed it under Linux, but you can also compile it under Cygwin to get a native windows application.

Anyway if you have any questions regarding the mentioned tools (setting them up, using them), or basic game programming concepts, don't hesitate and PM me, I'll be glad to help.

This is a site with plenty tutorials and stuff on game developlent: http://www.gamedev.net/
They also have mailing lists, I think.

BTW It's a common myth that C is "better" than Pascal. This is too simplified. C allows for some very low level access to memory (which can be useful for implementing an OS, for example), and can be more concise at some points, (like the famous {} instead of begin end), but this comes at a cost: C programs are very prone to errors due to unsafe pointer arithmetic and type-unsafe constructs. The pointers can be a real nightmare if the program has some complicated data. (This comes from my own experience, and also look at, say PlaneShift, it crashes more often than not) The Pascal-like syntax is less concise, but more readable, less error-prone, and perhaps a little easier to learn, too.

Languages like Pascal, Ada, (and C# and Java) are much more memory-safe and type-safe.

However, there is a problem with using the other languages from the practical point of view: as most systems and libraries are C-based, you depend on additional language-bindings for the libraries, which may not be available or uip-to-date.

Sometimes the user needs to have the standard libraries for the specific language to play the game, and in some cases on runtime environments (like JavaVM for Java, .NET for C#). This can be very bothering for the user, so it's a problem.

Cocktel Vision's games are also quite inventive in this field.

In their games (Goblins series, and in Woodruff and the Schnibble of Azimuth) all the characters (including the player characters) speak a language that is alien to the player (and completely fabricated). Actually each character just repeats a few syllabels over and over). But it works and so all characters are voiced, and yet all the voices takes just a few kilobytes of data. From Gobliins 2 onwards, the speech is subtitled in a special subtitle window at the bottom of the screen, so that the player understands what the characters say.

In Woodruff and the Schnibble of Azimuth,

Spoiler

the player character undergoes an accelerated growth from a baby to an adult, and consequently can't READ. So he won't read the signs (which are btw written in a fabricated writing and probably don't have any real sense) until he finds someone to teach him how to read.

[close]

Wow, I'm sure this is gonna be another great game! I enjoyed Stargate Adventure very much.

So, you're inspiring yourself by The Dig's interface, huh? I think that's a great idea, btw. I've never actually played it, just played the demo recently, and I realized that you've inspired yourself by this game when making Stargate adventure...

When O'Neal says he's going to light the torch, Samantha tells him to be careful... there is a VERY similar scene in The Dig (pulling a cable off the alien ship)... is this an intentional reference? It struck me immediately that it's a reference, but now I'm not so sure....

Anyway, I'll be really looking forward to playing this, just be sure to have a native english speaker proofread it, it will make a huge difference, beleive me!

This looks great!Ã, 

I wanted to try out the demo, but the link is broken... Can you fix it, please?

These look very nice!

The obvious problem with the profile walkcycle is that he's not really walking - he starts from a stand still, makes 2 steps, and comes to a halt, then starts again.

If it doesn't have to be a game, then The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe has a cool satyrÃ, 

Well, that was fun! And great graphics too!

Wow, so many ways to die or get stuck just in the demo.. the full game will probably be hellÃ, 

Anyway, great job, can't wait for Christmas!

(Some observations: I noticed that the soldier at the airport says "Zepeline" instead of "Zeppelin". The wind thingie obviously has some invisible label, like ' ', because when you point your mouse at it, the "Walk to" text moves a bit to the left.)

It looks so cool!

The only thing that bothers me is the sun. I myself would avoid including the sun whenever possible/appropriate.

IMO it's difficult to draw, and if you draw it, it must be behind some clouds - if it's not, it's too bright to look at in reality - so it will never look realistic on an image.

The sun has only 0.5 arc minutes in diameter, and so is very small on a photo with a typical focal length. (something like 1/10-1/20 of the image height), unless using a telephoto lens..(which is obviously not the case, considering the perspective) or a cartoony style, and I suppose this was your intention... but it doesn't work for me, doesn't mix with the rest of the image.

I would either make the sun MUCH smaller and veiled in clouds, or remove it completely.

Anyway, the rest of the image is just amazing, great job!

[shipped with every copy of windows]

Ooops, we have a little problem here,

Times New Roman and Arial are shipped with every copy of windows, typically in the c:windowsfonts   imes.ttf and arial.ttf

You could technically include them directly into your AGS game, but...
The problem: These are copyrighted (more exactly: they contain copyrighted hinting programs, outlines are generally free to distribute)
(and also it's technically less favourable, because it's slower)

My original idea was to take these fonts, rasterize them - and create raster fonts in SCI format.
Of course this takes some work (unless you have a specialised tool)... and a SCI font editor. Unfortunately I don't know of any, and the link in AGS manual is broken.

A description of the font format is here http://freesci.linuxgames.com/scihtml/x2345.html but I don't suppose you want to take the pain of making your own conversion tool.

Do you know this page?
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/scifonts.htm
These fonts are ready to download and use... some of them might work for you.


I myself don't feel like making an end-user font conversion/editing tool, because that's too much work. Nut if there is interest, I could make myself an ad-hoc tool and contribute some rasterizations (eventually some hand-rastered or customized low-res fonts, if I'm in a good mood).

IMO you should use a little larger font, and most importantly a thicker one. You definitely need an outline or background. Automatic outlining works, but it's only 1 pixel wide AFAIK. If you want a thicker/refined outlines, a big help is that some paint programs can do outlines automatically (like Autodesk Animator).

As for choosing a font, the 2 fonts considered the most readable of them all are Times New Roman (for printed text and high resolution) and Arial (for low, screen resolution). You might try the bold or black variants, if your characters are too thin. Decorational and non-standard fonts are always less readable.

Also, high-quality, hinted outline fonts (such as Times and Arial bundled with Windows) or hand-rastered fonts are preferable. (Vs. most free decorative TrueType fonts available on the net, mostly unhinted, their poor quality of rendering is very visible on the screen).