Topics

1

General Discussion / "Detail" slider in SCI games - what does it do?

« on: 03 Oct 2017, 06:37 »

Pretty much what title says. Games like Police Quest 3 or Quest for Glory had it, yet I've never noticed any difference. Skipping animation frames maybe?

2

Critics' Lounge / How do I convert myself to low saturation pixel artist?

« on: 23 May 2017, 19:09 »

My pixel art has always been colorful and high-saturation contrasty colors, similar to old arcade games (my heaviest influence in life are all those 1990's Neo-Geo fighting games).
Yet, I want to learn the low saturation mode.

Is there like some supreme guide to choosing low saturation or palette composition or how? A link everyone's been sharing or class everyone took? Or some rules of thumb, mathematical formula or something?

Using eyedropper on some others' work, I find colors that go just "yuck" in my head and would never been my first choice, yet they look so pretty when sprite comes together.
How to convert to low saturation and improve my color knowledge?

I have no idea how to google it, so I'll ask here.

So I want to go from this...


...to this


How do I handle the palette? I look at it, what do I have to see?

3

Critics' Lounge / Need some sprite criticism

« on: 17 Jun 2016, 12:05 »

I spent some time making pixels today. This is where I ended up...

x1 x2 x4 x8

Here's one without background (for edits n such)

x1 x2 x4 x8

And forcefully 4x scaled because Chrome just sucks.


I'm not sure what to do with eyes. They just don't work. I've been arranging and rearranging pixels for quite a while, but it still doesn't feel quite right.
Also, bomber jacket looks like he's hiding litter of kittens under it, although that's actually quite possible in an adventure game
Any ideas?

4

General Discussion / Seeking for don't-forget-stuff software

« on: 04 Aug 2015, 10:58 »

Right, this is difficult to explain.
What I need is something that I can use to remember stuff. Like things I've subscribed via Paypal and pay some monthly fee. Passwords and CD-keys. Links I don't need daily in my bookmarks, but might need at some point in future.

OR for better example,
when I released Pall last year, it very quickly became evident that if you make accounts on every digital app store, make various threads in many forums and send e-mail to outlets and websites, you need to remember when and where you did those things, what did you write to whom, under which name you registered as and so on and so on. With even minor attempt at marketing, the amount of stuff to keep track of grows very quickly (out of hand).

First idea was e-mail. I've had same e-mail address for ages and I just kept relevant e-mails. From forums and sites and whatnot. Keeping old e-mail felt like a good idea, but I learned the hard way that e-mail is very fragile - some crappy forum gets overrun with spam bots, your e-mail goes into some spam list, and say bye to your e-mail. No spam filter will hold back the flood of crap you'll be getting every day and after some time, you'll just give up. Now I'm wiser and I have 3 e-mail addresses I use to sign up (why do we have to sign up EVERYWHERE those days?!), assessing by the importance and trustworthiness of the website. But e-mail isn't quite what solves everything.

So I've done this (or regretted not doing this) by making buttload of .txt files. They aren't all that good idea in retrospect, I would much more prefer something more... advanced. That can have alarms and reminders and tabs and search and organizing and stuff.
A personal organizer perhaps?

But something that's not just crappy Outlook Calendar that no one uses, but something cool, with some help with management and more suited to stuff I described above. Perhaps even encryption and password thingy to keep the Pandora's box closed.

Does something like this exist?
And yes, I know it's a bad idea to keep passwords in written form, but if you register in 40 forums in a single day, you kind of need it.

5

Critics' Lounge / Need advice on design

« on: 25 Feb 2015, 08:17 »

Hi, CL over looong time!
I've managed to land myself into a bit of trouble. In July last year, I released a puzzle game named Pall. It was a logic game, roughly based on Laser Light (MS-DOS).
It looked like this:


As you can see, there's some stuff going on, but it isn't very clear if it's any fun or what's going on at all. Now see the trailer:

Website for further interest

Trailer, despite breaking YouTube 15-second immersion rule, shows what goes on much better. It shows that everything's much more alive and animated than screenshots would suggest, that background uses parallax movement and so on. Sadly, despite being on every imaginable platform except iOS, Pall was absolute flop. I had 7000 players, and 6940 of them chinese pirates. While most of the problems lie in lack of (and inability to do) marketing (keywords Android + Puzzle fires all spam filters for every journalist, screenshots look boring) and my blue-eyed belief that "if there's a quality product, people are willing to pay for it" (they do not on mobile market!), I'm also not satisfied with graphic style, hence this thread.

I'm still not done with Pall. A sequel is almost done, but I want to lose the pixellated, lifeless retro look and actually make use of color wheels and theory, and make it look fresher.
While I originally liked my art direction of first game very much - and was close to taking it even further and make everything in glorious 4-color cyan-purple-black-white CGA, audience did not like even current look (from as little feedback as I got).

So, as title says, I need some advice. Ideas. Vision. I've been experimenting with barebone shapes and almost no colors (See video), but on static screenshots it looks even more lifeless.

Generally, Pall isn't very complicated game. There's only 20-or-so setpieces that should have stylized, recognizable look.



Some of the game pieces. Sorry, glass corner isn't very visible due alpha.

What I need is a way to draw them in a way where they are still recognizable, but look significantly better. I also decided to up the size from original 48x48 to 96x96 pixels (or even 128x128), so I can add more detail and upscaling on various devices hurts less.

Does this make any sense?

Sorry for the wall of text, I've been thinking about this problem for months now while rewriting engine and I'm getting quite desperate

6

General Discussion / Techno-thriller + adventure games?

« on: 22 May 2013, 08:14 »

I'm looking for adventure games that have techno-thriller'ish story. Governments, conspiracies, '24' and mature stuff and so on.
All I could think of is KGB aka Conspiracy, which doubles as one of my favourites -- music and mood is extremely spot-on.
Does anyone know any more?

7

Recruitment / [HELP WANTED] Need a tileset artist for a platform game

« on: 31 Oct 2012, 17:04 »

Project:
Hamster Time (working name) - A 2D scrolling platformer with 16-bit era feel

Details:
Hamster Time is a platform puzzler, which I plan to release on multiple platforms, so far PC, Android and IOS. Game has somewhat SMB3 and Terraria feel, with different kits for protagonist to use for extra power and puzzle solving. Also, if interested, make sure to check out my youtube channel (in my signature) since I've added some making-of videos.

Positions Available:
I need someone to help me with tilesets. Everything's pure pixel art, and tilesets are either sets of 48*48px pieces or it's lower power of 2, depending on necessity. So far I have made one to show off game and such, but I feel that I'm not competent enough to make unique sets enough. I plan to have at least 6 different locales or "game worlds", so basically it's 6 tilesheets complete with graphics for both walkable and decorative stuff. I can also layer different tiles on top of each other and so, so restrictions on art are quite loose. However, I likely won't recruit anyone whose art is too different from mine or would clash with rest of the graphics too much.

Deadline:
There's no deadline per se, but I would love to get game at least to a beta stage by start of 2013.

Comments:
Interested parties can reply to this thread or contact me via PM.

There's no payment and I'm operating on zero budget, but since project is intended to be commercial, I could offer share in project up to 15% of profits, should there be any.
Considering what I have so far and game being multi-platform, my hopes for success aren't too low.

8

Critics' Lounge / Help me improve a this TINY animal

« on: 15 Jun 2012, 12:32 »

Meet my new unnamed protagonist. He's a hamster.


1X:



4X:


I'm generally happy with his looks, but shading and contrast needs some work, since it's hard to notice him, being so small and all.
Thanks!

9

General Discussion / Trigonometry help needed!

« on: 20 Feb 2012, 07:19 »

Making a top-down car game (with Game Maker).
What I totally suck at, is physics/trigonometry.

Let the picture explain:


So, both cars are simple rectangular sprites (let's say 32x64px) and rotated about center point (origin) (xy on image).
At some point they collide. Not important which way, which point or what angle are they at. On picture, there's just a random example.
How to return this precise location where collision occurs?

Here's something to simplify this: Both cars have 4 corner points, and collision happening point is always at one of those 8 points.
T-shaped or otherwise full edge-to-edge collisions do not count, or at least they are not important to me. All I need is at least one colliding point.

I imagine it can be solved by dividing them into triangles and using phytagoras' theorem or something, or it's some kind of newtonian physics that makes it simple, but I have no clear idea how.

Any kind of pseudocode or formula should do... can anyone help?

10

General Discussion / Visiting London, need tips

« on: 10 Jan 2012, 19:48 »

I decided to see UK this year, although my stay will be fairly short (1,5 days).
While I put together rather detailed map what I want to see and how to fill this short period of time, I have few problems/unknowns:

1) Transit. I arrive and depart from Luton Airport which is rather far from city center and hotel (30 miles or so)

I think there shouldn't be too much problems in getting to hotel (which located in far NE, near Lea Bridge rd/A104), but leaving is a problem: plane departs at 7:45AM and I have no clue if anything drives me so early there.
Also, I figured there's trains, metro and buses. What would be most reasonable/not too expensive and what operates at night?
Google maps for some reason fails to give me any directions also. Is there something else I could use?

2) How does it work? Where do I get a ticket for rail or metro, etc? Are there booths, whatever? I have honestly no clue atm.

3) What to see:
I figured basic touristy stuff like Tower of London, maybe National Museum or Imperial war museum, planned a long walk that would take me through all interesting stuff, but is there anything I should see?

And any other tips would be appreciated!

11

General Discussion / Need quick Excel/VBA scripting help

« on: 30 Dec 2011, 17:40 »

Thing is like this. There's a a sports event. Marathon or track run or whatever.
Every contestant has name (or number, as on picture) and amount of laps done under corresponding column.

What I want to do is that every time contestant finishes a lap, you can just type his number somewhere (say, a query window opens where you can enter his number or whatever) and automatically "laps" count under correct contestant number will increase.

The list of contestants could be very long so it would be too time consuming to find correct contestant by hand every time lap is finished, that's why this system should work in such quicker way. I know it's basically "hello world" in any other programming language, but I'm not too familiar with scripting in VBA and no time to learn it enough to be. And they demand it'd work in excel.

Can anyone help?

12

Critics' Lounge / Need walkcycle help

« on: 14 Jul 2011, 22:43 »

Spend last 3 hours animating and fixing this character.

Problem is, I realized that I'm unable to predict logical movement of clothing and result sucks pretty much as you can see:


2x:


Also, he's all over the place, which isn't good also. How to make him more static and less under ecstasy?
So I need a help with this. What I'm not going to do is reduce colors or number of frames. I just want to learn to do it right.

Here's sheet too, 32 by 64px, 10 frames


And here's proof that clothing can be done perfectly with proper skills or japanese passport:


Any professional help?

13

General Discussion / Looking for a simple browser-based 3D viewer

« on: 16 May 2011, 13:35 »

I'm sure you've seen them. A little java or flash applet that let's you view 3d model in your browser, rotate and zoom it. Nothing else. If you've played WoW, you've seen alot of those on various wiki-like pages.

Thing is, I cannot find any. Google results in horrid, undecipherable mess that has mix of sickly expensive "solutions" and some coded-in-a-basement versions that do much more than I need. But I only need a simple little window on my webpage in which you can look at models. And it has to be compatible with something every casual user has installed, flash or java. Or in latter case, at least download needed scripts automatically or even secretly without frightening the end user.

What I don't want at all are solutions which ask for additional add-on or plugin to be installed, such as VRML or O3D.
O3D simple scene viewer looks perfect, but... install something additional for this? Nah.
Papervision3D... their page looks like someone ate a chinese dictionary and barfed it directly into html. I cannot navigate this.

Embed 3D in PDF is last fallback, it works and everyone and their grandmother has acrobat installed, but it doesn't look neither good or quick.

Surely someone has made a simple, user friendly thing by 2011?

Can anyone help?

14

General Discussion / Win 7 BSOD: an educational story

« on: 20 Apr 2011, 14:00 »

Bought new machine a while ago. State-of-technology thing, with Intel i7 950, SSD, loads of RAM, etc.
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit included. And for some time it was nice.

Then, basically out of nowhere, I started getting those BSODs... I do something, and suddenly screen goes blue, dumps 12 GB of ram onto disk and says

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
Error 3b.

And restarts. After restart, everything is frozen. Or won't restart at all. Or restarts, works fine for about 2 minutes, and BSODs again. I turn machine off for 5 minutes, and I gain extra minutes before it BSODs again when I turn it on.
Not wanting guarantee repair to relieve me of my machine for weeks or poke around on my hard drives, I tried everything I could to fix it by myself. Googled much, fiddled with BIOS, ran memory tests.
For this particular error, there's no knowledge out there. Best I could find (including microsoft's page) was probable causes: faulty memory, faulty drivers, overheating, IDE conflict, bad jumper settings on some drive

But none seemed to be the cause! Also, it wouldn't explain machine going haywire where none of such things were present.

So I reinstalled Windows. Specifically avoided those thrashy disks computer came with (motherboard drivers, suspicious looking "quick resume" software, etc), because they look quite horrible and unstable to be honest.
A month or so, everything worked fine again.
Until a week ago, I get the BSOD loop again. I am damn sure I haven't installed anything, have no viruses, there should be no reason whatsoever for machine to simply start BSODing like Windows ME. But it did.

And then it finally caught me... while making 140th restart or so, I noticed that before restarting, "applying update 1438 of 7534" flickered on the screen.

Windows Update!!!

After some testing in safe mode, I can confirm that there's something about windows update that trashes machine. It applied updates fine, and for one particular "update", everything crashes. I always knew that going 64-bit means more problems, but never that they would come directly from Microsoft itself.

I turned windows update off. Everything works. No BSODs for 4 days so far. So it crashed because it tried to update and since it crashed, it had to try again and again and again... while I was scratching my head why the hell machine crashes while nothing is going on...

Now, as I mentioned, there's no such story on the internet (as far as google tells) and the only reason for this one to exist is to help whoever falls to the same pit. I doubt it would be many AGSers, but google robots go over AGS too. Because only god knows how much hair I lost trying to solve this one.

15

General Discussion / Help me name a club!

« on: 28 Mar 2011, 20:08 »

Well, I'm participating in a little project, a closed club.

Premise:

Basically bunch of single, independent people with common goal: to spend weekends in interesting way. People have to be single, sane, have income and no commitments, such as kids or spouse.
Every club member (in rotation) has to organize a weekend for the rest of the club, it's basically whatever, from visiting city bars to spending weekend at host's country house to a hiking trip... at least once a month.

Problem:

What's missing yet and what's I'm tasked with is to find an unique name for the club.
It should be short, memorable and preferably very mysterious. I've wrote down a long list I could think of, but don't like any them.
So far, RDX is everyone's favorite (RDX is a type of explosive, feels powerful enough yet many don't know what it means thus mysterious) but we cannot get good domain of same name so I need an alternative.

Reading the premise, what would you name the club?

16

General Discussion / Help me fix this wire! *solved!*

« on: 29 Nov 2010, 20:50 »

Laptop charger.
Inner wire intact and isolated.
No soldering kit.
No money for new charger.
1,5 hours battery life left.

How to fix this elegantly - I mean, so it wouldn't break next day?

17

Critics' Lounge / Tree action: level 2... Help!

« on: 22 Sep 2010, 12:46 »

I'm still struggling to animate top-down trees.... last fight ended with a victory and custom generator.
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=41752.0

This time, it's about 50 levels harder: palm trees!



Now, animating this one will not work with simple leaf clumps moving over each other.
I have no idea how to make palm sway in the wind. Anyone?

Also, how's that sprite? Did I miss something major?

18

General Discussion / Yet another.... tablet thread

« on: 14 Sep 2010, 10:12 »

I want one.

Should I buy one?
----------------

That was my whole point in 2 sentences.
But really, I do want one but I haven't used one and not quite sure is it worth it.
Will it get daily usage or act as expensive dust collector?

So, if you have one, tell me which case is yours?
Please dont' give me "it depends....blah blah" replies. A quick search in Critics Lounge shows clearly what I do, and how I draw.
I'm drawing something about 3-4 times a week. Enough to justify Photoshop installation. And I want to become an awesome 2D artist.
So be down-to-earth-honest.

Also, how important is the size? Wacoms are either really tiny, or really expensive.
Is there noticeable difference between A4 and A5, for example? It's half the size  I know, but does it matter somehow?
Also, is name of Wacom foolproof quality guarantee or it varies greatly by models also?

19

Critics' Lounge / Like trees? Help me to animate one!

« on: 03 Sep 2010, 18:33 »

Long story short, I've exhausted all ideas on how to animate those top-down-viewed trees.
I want them to sway in wind, with leaves shaking and stuff. And it should be fluid enough to make it dependent on wind speed (which randomly rises and lowers in game)...

Despite numerous attempts to either automate or craft this, I do not get even semi-realistic result
All I need is a technique, one nice-looking tree or tutorial... something I could use to animate much more trees.



Can YOU help?

20

Critics' Lounge / Website C&C!

« on: 04 Aug 2010, 16:22 »

I'm trying to chop together a website for my tower defense game.

However, I'm quite inexperienced at this... So any help or C&C on elements and placement would be appreciated.



I imagine main content running in large window on left (an iframe) and buttons on right for simple navigation.

However, I'm not quite sure what should be on a game site. Yes, a demo, some screens, a trailer maybe... and forums for support and page for buying.... But what else?

Also, how to improve look?

EDIT: Please move thread to CL, sorry