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I knew I might be asking you for a lot, so I really appreciate your clarification. I feel it has helped my understanding of shading.

However why I said they looked out of placce is, that you use obviously less colours in the rest of the picture. It seems as if you made the whole image in MSPaint and then opened in Photoshop to add the shadows. If not, then, shouldn't the cloud too be a gradient. Perhaps you might want to try something close to the style you have in the cloud to the dunes. Also, googling for some images might help I'm sorry if I just confused you or took your time with unimportant things, just thought you deserved to know.

I sorta agree with you there. While gradients look nice, they clash. A case of 'kill your darlings'.
I adjusted my picture and came up with this: (24 colours now!)


I still have a lot of work to do on my shading, though.

Of course.
I started a new game in 256 colours (I've tested 320x200 and 320x240) and used this image as room 1:



It looks normal in the editor, but if I run the game, it looks like this:

I would like to know why you made the downcast shadow of the fence and the dunes with a gradient or houndreds of colours while the tree, the cloud? the house are very minimalistic in this sense?

The picture uses 146 colours, so that's allright.
I could have chosen to do the shadow on the fence in two-three colours, but since I already used so many colours on the sanddunes, I decided to use a gradient.
Does it really look out of place?

The fence at the very front... Where does the light come to it? From this perspective it looks as if the sun was behind it to me. I mean when you look at the shadow it casts, straight to the side, not to the back. Just some little things you might want to think about. Depends how perfect you want it to be with a months notice.

I'm not sure I follow. That yellow thing in the sky is the sun, it's light hits the fence from the right and casts a long shadow to the left / down-left.
Could you perhaps explain with a quick paintover? (for me this image is an excercise in shading, so I'd appreciate it.)

*Bump*

I have the same problem, also using 3.0, 256 colours and 320x240.

I solved this by changing the black in my original image to grey (32,32,32) but it's a bit of a ramshackle solution. Bug?

Minor bug:
When I imported a background into my 320x240, 256 colour game, AGS told me:

"The background could not be imported. The error was:
You cannot import a hi-colour or true-colour image into a 256-colour game."

But the error was that my resolution was wrong. I had me thinking I was crazy for a minute.

No, just made some weird typing error. Fixed!

Thanks for the positive reactions. I made the light green area a little bit bigger, which improved it. (I tried adding lighter areas inside the tree, but it just didn't look great.)
That's a good point about the cactus. I won't change it, but I'll let the characters notice it. It can be easily integrated in the story.

Keep it up, what tut did you use?

I didn't use one tutorial specifically, but read a lot of them to learn the basic techniques, especially shading. I guess I owe most of it to Increator's background tutorial.

EDIT: And I used Eric's tutorial for drawing lo-res characters.

Hi!

Using tuts to pump up my drawing skills, I've managed to amaze myself by drawing this. (it's for this months MAGS.)

But since no man can judge himself, I'd appreciate it to know what bugs you about this. And if somebody knows a tutorial about drawing sand, I'd appreciate a link; I'm not too happy about those sanddunes.

 

This background uses extreme character scaling (100-25%). I've put some quickly drawn guy next to it to show the proportions. The fence is meant to be half finished, in case you're wondering.

I have the same with trains.

I travel by train daily and it's I also get annoyed daily by people who stand right in front of the doors when a train arrives, effectively blocking the way out. Why don't they step aside? I don't know.

But on topic: when I was on holiday in Spain the plaza outside my window seemed like an outdoors cafe: it was full of people until five o'clock in the morning, at which time it was covered in empty bottles and trash.
At seven some cleaners came round an cleaned it all in 20/30 minutes. (Why the hell was I up at seven on a holiday?)

I guess those cleaners make all the difference. And when a place is clean people are more inclined to put something in a trashcan.

I was looking for some info about shading, and I must say: many thanks, sensei.

Looking good!

Just one thing: Please tell me the light zapper will be in this game?

Illogical mazes like the minotaur's maze in KQ6 (where it's trial-and-error) are annoying. Not too mention the fact you die every time you take a wrong turn.

If it's a puzzle where you can know the route, like your number 2 or the Return to Zork puzzle, it's a nice change in the game.
(I'm also reminded of the copy-protection maze in Larry 3, where the answer is in the manual in the form of a song containing only of words that starts with N, W, S and E, which was so obvious in hindsight.)

No. 3: I like those Dr.Brain type of things. Like Ali said, use a robot to navigate through some mechanical thingy or a pet rat through a maze and you've got a great puzzle.

You must create a game that is incomplete, but it must of course still have an ending.

Ha! Isn't that the case with all MAGS games?    It reminds me of that scene in The Truman Show where he walks into a building and the set hasn't been put up yet.

Sounds like fun. I'll try my luck again this month!

It's a very annoying tune. But if you use it in a situation where you're being chased by Micheal Myers it'll scare the shit out of a lot of people.

Some things I noticed:
+ 0:09 this guitarriff-like melody in the background is really good
- 1:03 this melody (which returns a few times) gets almost out of tune. Probably due to the nature of modules. It made me feel real uneasy, if that's a good thing don't change it.
+ The structure is good; not messy at all. It is unpredictable, which I see as a plus.
- if you want to use it as a background tune you might want to make the high-pitched sound (which starts at 0:10) a little less pronounced, so it doesn't distract too much.

*raises a glass*  Congratulations man, she's beautiful!

( point two: Young children will always need some way to express themselves: drawing pictures, making music, making up stories,  etc.
Adventure games are a way of telling a story, they can stimulate logical thinking and, when written well, can improve your language skills and your vocabulary. Making a game requires you to practice a multitude of skills: writing, building puzzles, drawing.
I think children could benefit from AGS.)

Hi!

Anyway I'm just looking for some direction on how to get started. I've gotten the basics down, so if anyone would like to toss at me any helpful hints, that'd be great

- Have your story ready before you start scripting the game. That helps.
- Originality is difficult; if you can't think of anything; pick your favorite cliche plotline and add your own touches to it. See also this discussion.
- And of course: Make something you'd like to play.

That's my two cents...

I thought your game was more creatively courageous than mine: the concept definitely has potential.  I guess all those MAGS voters are conservative in their game outlooks, however.

Thanks. I had a lot of fun making it; but in hindsight it's not really a lot of fun to play.

One question:  I never did find a different ending to your game, though I played it through four times.  Is there an alternate ending, or just different ways of arriving at the same conclusion?

Hermes always arrives at the end, so there's three ways to the same goal.

(There are three animated scenes:
1. the argument between the wizard and the elf where the demon gets hurt.
2. the enema scene
3. the 'fight' between the demon and the elf.
If you've seen all three, you've basically done all there is to do.)

-TwinMoon

Well congratulations BaRoN. Yours was indeed the better game.
Hope to see some nice rules for this month, I'll be entering again.

This is how I'd do it:

Code: ags

    if (button == eMouseLeftInv) {
      InventoryItem *item = InventoryItem.GetAtScreenXY(mouse.x, mouse.y);
      if (Mouse.Mode == eModeLookat) item.RunInteraction(eModeLookat);
      else player.ActiveInventory = item;
    }

And remember to set "Handle inventory clicks in script" on the General Settings to true (but judging from your post I guess you know that).

Well, there's not only Trainz. There's also Microsoft Train Simulator and whatnot. There aren't that many games, but there are some. The selling point (aside from putting trains, rails etc.) is that you can actually step in the trains too and drive them.

I generally ignore all Microsoft products From their screenshots Trainz didn't look right, that's why I discarded it.
Probably games like these are not very exciting, unless you could race on the tracks you make. But that raises the question: why don't you do it with cars?

Well, CybRailroads will be a train company managing sim, really. You set up routes from settlement to settlement and then you set up trains to service those routes. The type of rails you use (single, double, with signals, electrified etc.) affects the type and number of trains you can use on that route. Then, transport passengers and cargo. Settlements will continue to grow and new industries will come and go, so you need to keep an eye on your routes, to make sure they're not obsolete or the stations will be overcrowded.

That's basically it, in a nutshell. Not incredibly diverse, but might be fun for a while, since there'll be three campaigns (easy, medium, and hard) and every time you start a campaign, a new map is generated randomnly.

Ah, I see what you mean. (I guess that's what you get for not playing a lot of games.) It's like Settlers with trains!

This is a great idea. I change my vote to CybRailroad.