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Cool project, bet you had fun and learned a lot!

You pretty much nailed depth of field, light and toning. For a project this small, that's pretty impressive.

no quarter - led zep

Grim Fandango - if it hadn't been for the somewhat awkward controls and a select few poor puzzles I'd say this was the best slice of entertainment that I ever experienced, all categories. There have certainly been games designed with better flow and more intuitive controls, but never has any game come close to beating the amazing mood of the Grim Fandango universe. Art, music, voice acting, plot, dialog... these are all flawless.

Runners up to me are GK1, MI2, DOTT, FT, THE DIG. All of them amazing games, but all of them with their own internal piles of odd flaws that I'd love to do without. It's strange, somehow it feels like the adventure game genre choked off before it really had a chance to stabilize.

I'd love to put the broken sword games onto this list because of their amazingly good flow. Nothing flows as good as a broken sword game. wow. I have however sadly never really liked the games' style. They've got that schizophrenic realistic/cartoony style that doesn't really do it for me. The character animation is spotless though. And the music rocks, so they certainly deserve to be mentioned.

Oh while talking about flow, I'd really like to mention the Blackwell games. Perfect pacing.

I realize I may be celebrating things a day early, but heck, I'll hopefully be rascally drunk far from any computer tomorrow by this time, so won't have the chance to do my greetings then.

With Christmas and all I hope y'all are getting some time off from work and whatnot so you can spend some quality time with  your beloved family and friends AGS projects! I sure have! Mostly been doing lame pr work though, but still, good to get it done.

Thanks AGS'ers for enriching my life in the odd way that you do! May 2011 see the release of many new juicy adventures!

I suck at walkcycles, but I think it looks good. I would have sliced the feet in two though, so you can bend them on the middle and shape them after the ground. I'm sure that will add some weight and realism.

I just randomly googled "line weight tutorial" and found this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt8w8V81Loc

I couldn't stand her voice though so I only watched four seconds of it but I'm pretty sure she sums it up. If the squeaky voice gets to you just try googling it. I'm sure you'll find lots of alternatives. Good luck!

Wyz: I'm glad you found it interesting:)
Baron: A short analysis of the edits follows:

Page 3/3 of the intro is completely cut out since it contains spoilers as well as a bunch of really confusing dialog that doesn't fit in with the current storyline.

The original intro contained four different bad-guys. I simply decided this was way too much for a player to take in in one serving. So I completely removed one of the baddies, and toned down the role of the two henchmen, so that they would clearly be read as goons and thus shuffling all baddie story-focus onto one sole character. This may seem like a flat set-up but in reality I'm certain there's no need to complicate things more than this for a good story to begin. (Obviously more characters will be thrown into the mix as time goes by, but keeping it simple at a start is crucial for flow, I am certain.)

The original script featured a professor Moorhead in person alongside Lina, thus adding another main character to confuse the player with in the beginning. By still keeping him in the story, but moving him to the university and only talking to him through phone, we clarify to the player that there's no point focusing on him now, and thus let things flow a bit better.

One thing I wish I could have kept but had to cut because of time constraints was the comic relief scene where the two goons frantically paddle with their hands in the water not to go over the edge with the current. This would have been fun but was quite simply, too much work. I also ended up cutting the grappling hook scene since it was too much work and not really something I thought would add to the flow.

Works like crazy!

A cool trick to add to your cyberspace elements. 

I had one issue though but it may be the result of sheer user-stupidity; Once hitting ESC the cursor refused to budge. It was still connected to the 3d viewport and hence, always centered.

Yeah, the joey upgrade thing was a cool puzzle-device! I'd love to see more of that. It's cool how he could stay in character and still change in so many ways. Probably all due to his honestly quite well written sidekick humor.

As for the ending, yes, for the time I can imagine the ending felt refreshingly "grown up". Now however... I dunno, I wasn't impressed. I'd rather say it felt a bit lacking and didn't really wrap things up as well as I would have wished.

I'm sure I would have loved bass if I had played it some time during the "golden age" along with the early monkey island games etc but I never actually got the chance to do so. I remember playing it a tiny bit back then however, just small fractions at my friends house, and I remember thinking it was really cool.

This is why I was disappointed when I finally got the chance to play through the full game just a couple of months ago. Don't hate me now but here is my unbiased non nostalgic view of things: I found the story rather flat, nothing was pushing me along. Also the main character didn't make a single impression on me. The world promises a lot but never really goes beyond being a bunch of small living quarters and a couple factory rooms, from an exploratory perspective, a truly dissatisfying experience. Hardly the intriguing, sprawling dystopian world I was hoping for.

To be fair though, I'm certain looking at things through nostalgic eyes has colored my view of many games I love, say for an example, fate of atlantis. Had I not had the chance to play foa until this very day, who knows what I would have thought of it? Most likely I'd think the puzzles were rather poorly designed and the plot introduced in a somewhat haphazard manner. (Note, I'm not picking at foa, I love foa. I am merely making an example.)

What I'm trying to say is that many of the "golden era" adventure games had flaws, big ones. We have merely chosen not to remember them. So I guess I should stop picking at BASS.  

Besides, seeing its free now I must admit the game is worth the price tag and it's certainly well worth spending a couple of hours on. So if you haven't played it, make sure to do so! I can certainly see why many people love the game, it does have a lot going for it once you keep your expectations in check.

cianty: That's a good idea! Given some time I'll try and get the menu in all those screens. Most likely that would look better too:D

If you're going for a line art style I recommend reading up on line weight theory. It's not tricky at all and good stuff to have in the back of your head when drawing.

Basically it's a way of separating layers of depth by utilizing different thickness on different outlines.

looping the soundtrack at the office today:) Love it. An incredibly moody mix that really, really complements the dark freaky world of snakes!

played through a large part of this yesterday and I love it. Your writing rocks. Technobabylon is what BASS should have been.

Chicky, I doubt he's missed that. Google them and you'll notice they've caught some amazing coverage all over the place with their game. I think the whole clay/cardboard gimmick is really giving them a push as far as being covered on game sites, and I envy them for it. Hopefully this rather impressive coverage also reflects their sales.

Coool! Thanks for sharing:D

I love the beer train.  8) it worked wonders in the intro with the title music.

Impressive! Very ambitious project to say the least. I wish you luck in finishing it!

Nice M41A by the way, any chance there are going to be xenomorphs involved? 

Yay! gonna download this as soon as I get home from work! 

Congrats on releasing it!

hey matti thanks for the kind words:D Means a lot!

Ascovel, thanks for the heads up about the honorable mentions! I wonder if an honorable mention actually creates any traffic though. Lol I'd never bother looking up runners up. 

If anyone out there is the least bit interest I can also add that the skygoblin website has now been updated with... nothing really. just a shinier front page. Please drop by if you're bored and got nothing else to do.  8)

Yo all!

To celebrate the fact that I finally got my Journey Down site updated, I have decided to release my original cinematic storyboards for public viewing pleasures!

If you're into making cutscenes yourself this may be in interesting read, specifically if you through some mad feat of memory mastery actually remember what the cinematics are like in the finished game. Comparing my storyboards and the actual result is a good way of getting a feeling for what things were better left alone than actually implemented. I had many great ideas, and many utterly lousy ones. Many of them were cut out because I felt they only confused the player, other things were removed since I felt they weren't really worth the effort it would take to make them.

In retrospect I am very happy with the final cut that the game ended up with. Some few things from this original storyboard that are missing would have been fun to implement but all in all I'm very happy that I managed to trim it down so well. (Trimming it down was not only dramaturgically important, but also critical to me actually being able to finish it off.)

Hopefully someone out there finds this an interesting read. If you've got similar documents don't be shy to show them! I'd love to have a peek.