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Is Johnny's death going to be the catalyst for Audrey to show up? Feels like it.

I'm fine with the macro plot as long as the main thrust of the story is told through the micro plots that have been weaving together. This episode felt like an intentional interruption to the steady pace of the show, perhaps a catalyst for things to start moving. I'm eating this season up. Even the Dougie stuff has me transfixed. Can't say I've been feeling the frustration.

Just played through the whole game and it turned out great Loved the lore dump you created around the scenes I drew up.

If anyone is still looking for pixel art help I'm more than happy to contribute. I've hidden some examples below:

Love it. I've always struggled with shadows -- how far they're cast, how defined they are, how dark they should be etc. It makes me sick/amazed when I see illustrators who can pump out quality concepts in a few hours. Thanks. Do you mean, for example, the sides of the road getting thinner as it reaches the vanishing point? That's the first thing I noticed when I re-looked at it this week. I am trying to keep it simple and relatively flat, but I don't want to go too far and make it look cartoony.

Thanks a lot. I plan to do a test run of the character design this weekend -- see how much colour/detail is required.

Blambo, your style is reminiscent of The Witcher concept art which I'm a huge fan of. And Clyde, your colourful layout with abstract figures inside geometric shapes reminded of The Book of Kells or something. Cool. I posted a rough example of an art style in the AGMN thread -- here's a title screen I put together in the same style (ignore generic GUI): The idea was: What if the entire game looked like a western poster? Just 3 shades of black on a textured background, with a bit of colour every now and again. This way I can make enough scenes to make a decent length adventure game / visual novel, without it taking me 4 years. The characters will be largely traced e.g. Hotel Dusk because it looks cool, but also because I'm not the strongest illustrator in the world. Gotta work with what you've got.

Agreed. Small update on my western adventure game/visual novel: I looked further in to Ren'Py and it seems too good not to use for the type of game I'm making. It uses Python for scripting, and a programmer friend of mine recommended Python as a good beginner's language, and he even had a great book to give me -- Hello World! Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners by Waren & Carter Sande. While I'm not completely new to programming (I do a load of front-end web stuff), my visually-orientated brain still does not have a great fundamental understanding of the underlying principals, and this book really starts from ground zero. I mean, I've bluffed my way through arrays and whatnot in php but it's about time I learned this stuff for reals.

When I first started writing code I used to skimp on comments because what's the point if I understand it? Turns out that even if others aren't reading it, it's super easy to forget what you were trying to do months/years down the line. Your brain doesn't account for how badly you sucked X years ago. If other people are reading/editing it then it goes without saying. And my experience is pretty much exclusively in web dev. It's probably even more important in game dev. I still get my kicks from absurd class names.

Thanks. That's a good idea -- I'll definitely change up the background texture so it's different from screen-to-screen. Thanks a lot. I guess the presentation will be closer to a visual novel, but it will play like an adventure game hybrid, with puzzles and an inventory but no item scavenging or combining. I'd like to avoid the "dating" side of visual novels, as well as the "rub everything on everything" side of adventure games. The coloured fauna is a good idea, like a washed out green. Adding a bit of colour to indoor areas also makes sense, to emphasise certain details. I'm definitely going for that desert town vibe -- a small place in the middle of nowhere; a gas station, general store, motel, maybe a trailer park. I was thinking of making it in Adventure Game Studio, the downsides being the limited resolution (1024x768 if you want to stick to the latest, stable build) and lack of multi-platform support. On the plus side, I'm quite familiar with it and it takes a lot of the grunt work out of making an adventure game. I hear Ren'py is great for visual novels, but I'm not sure how well it extends beyond that basic formula.

Hey guys, some super impressive stuff going on here that's inspired me. I've been thinking of making a 2D mystery game set in a small western town. I've made a handful of games but struggle to finish them due to my debilitating obsession with perfecting the art before the mechanics. So I need an art style where I can pump out 2D scenes relatively quickly (think Phoenix Wright-style backgrounds), but still looks good. I was messing around and thought maybe something like this: Obviously it'd be more refined, but I'm just not sure if this would cut it for an entire game? You'd have close-ups with a bit more detail, and I was thinking the characters could be in colour. Any feedback would be hugely appreciated. I'm open to suggestions. I love a bit of cartography so I'm thinking a nice map would be how you move around town -- clearly indicate your current location, "unlocked" areas, maybe a cool "trail of footsteps" animation from one area to the next -- that sort of thing.