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I don't know if you want to hide the first aid block when it is dark, but using the robot's wholly black palette like Espozo said does not only help hiding it, but would probably also help make the exit sign more believable once the unreal light of the box is gone.

Also loving the backpack keeping in the sauna. And, well done on the glass wall. It stood out to me as really good looking.


Sharing a technique: It is a common practice in film animation to let components of a unit lag one up to several frames behind each other, anywhere one component is the force that pushes the other into action.

Two examples:
1)When the main character is riding the bike, the vibration of the vehicle would (in the real world or in a cartoon) make the character bump - not in unison, but in cascade. This would've been easy to implement on a system with less sprite restrictions, of course. Attempting this on large nes sprite groups might need to involve tile-level animation.

2)When the finger is pushing the button, there is a span of travel for the finger to do before the actual pushing takes place. This may be simulated with a similar cascaded lag.

The sense of pre-signaling movement prepares the audience to both focus on and accept the action about to come. In the examples above, the actions are pretty self-explanatory, though, so it's mostly for appearance; to heighten the naturality or hide the animator's hand.

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That's really useful. I do struggle with the animations, especially for such a large character.

I've got a bit of that delayed movement going on with the scooter in terms of the chassis bumping a frame later than the wheels to try to show some shocks. In early drafts of the scooter animation I had the character bumping a frame later than the chassis and it looked good, but either way I was trying it, it was eating up my tile or scanline restrictions. It wasn't a conscious decision though and having you explain the reasoning behind it will help me keep it in mind for future animations.

On that note, to save space, we're using a combination of showing the player performing an action and just showing the result of the player's action (for example, we may show him open a door, but later just show a drawer open in front of him). Basically, each screen is getting 1-2 major animations even though it may have 4-5 interactions.

There are actually quite a few animations I'd like some feedback on that I don't want to post publicly. (Considering how niche the player base will be, we'd like to keep some surprises in the game). I'll send you a PM if you've got the time.

As for the glass partition, I actually had all three as glass in my first draft of the screen, but later realized how silly it was having translucent partitions around a toilet.

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Well, at SFA (a college where my mother works), in the men's restroom next to the indoor swimming pool, there are no stall walls around the toilets.

Progress on this has come along enough that I think it's okay to show some off. This is from The Cowlitz Gamers' 2^nd Adventure.

After finishing the illustration and packaging for Lukasz Kur's original last year, I put together a mockup for a sequel with larger sprites and more detailed graphics, (based off of the illustrations which were based off of the 8x8 sprites of the original game.)

Luckily, the programmer not only liked the mock-up, but was willing to code a sequel based off of it. Here's a screenshot of it at its current state.

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Possibly not the best thread for it, I may take all of the Cowlitz posts to their own thread in Homebrew Projects when I get the time to type up a proper OP.

In the meantime, here are some manual illustrations for the game:



These are all four turtle-type enemies, of the sixteen or so total enemies in the game.

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I'm currently coloring the CG2 cover art and thought I'd post this comparison with last year's cover art here:



The rightmost illustration was based off of the original (8x8) graphics of the first game:



The enemy sprite for the second game was based off of the first game's illustrative representation:



…and the leftmost illustration above is based off of the enemy sprites for the second game.

This creative path was similar for the characters, enemies and items present in the first game, although a few of the characters (such as the new lead and some enemies) were created originally for the second game.

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Looks neat! …though, except for that first cover-image, the restless dead have unusually good posture.

However, this sort of artwork path has Telephone-lke risks. (See the strategy-guide image here: http://zelda.gamepedia.com/Fokkeru , which hardly resembles a bird at all!)

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Well damn... (I could never draw that... ) What program do you use? Adobe illustrator? Like all Adobe products though, pirating paying for it is the problem.

@Myask
Thanks.
Is "telephone" a reference I'm missing? Anyway, the lillustrative liberties taken with retro game art is something I'm actually a huge fan of and choose to embrace in my own work instead of avoid. My favorite MegaMan covers are PAL MM 1, followed by US MM 2. (Followed by Rockman 1~3 on Famicom, though)

That Zelda example is pretty extreme, but it's definitely an interesting interpretation of the sprite. I'm glad you showed it to me. I'd love to track down a scan of the other illustrations.

@Espozo
I draw and ink by hand, color in Photoshop, and use Illustrator for layout. Sometimes (like here), I letter by hand as well, and may vectorize the lettering in Illustrator.

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Telephone is a game, it is also called chinese whispers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers
In the game telephone the original message typically no longer resembles the last message, due to multiple minor changes. Myask example is how this occured with Fokkeru via sprite reinterpretation.

For modern examples of telephone, see Drawception. Sometimes a theme is kept, but more often not. (snort)

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Ah, yes. I'm familiar with the classroom game, but hadn't made the connection when reading it.

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First draft of our foldout manual for Cowlitz. Dashed lines indicate folds, won't actually be printed. Some of enemy names have been revised.

Please post any errors that you notice. I'm pretty bad at proofreading my own writing.

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This looks really good! I really dig the coloring style.