I’ve been playing around with different ways to do the graphics and animation for my adventure game. I’ve added some screenshots to show my first test results. The first is an animation-style pirate that came with a Toon Boom tutorial. Actually I find Toon Boom an awesome program and way better than Flash for drawing and animating characters. The characters I make for the game could also be used in a comic if I wanted, which is pretty cool. It’s basically “cut out” animation. That means you put the characters together like posable puppets and then animate them. So I could do some really nice TFR style graphics should I want to.
The next screenshots are graphics I put together in Daz3 Advanced yesterday afternoon. All the sets and props and characters are ones that I’ve bought over time from Daz 3d. I’m always shopping the sales 
But I was amazed at how good they looked in the game engine once they were put together. Using a lot of professionally done sets, clothing, characters, etc. made for a really great look. The character was just thrown together in Daz3 using some cool clothes and textures that I have. The lighting and rendering is one of the real tricks to doing 3d right, and I’m pretty impressed with the results. Imagine what I could do if I actually spent some time on it.
I’ve been wanting to do a cool cyberpunk adventure, with a touch of Shadowrun and Bladerunner, only less violent and with more humor to it. And I’d have to say that those 3d test graphics look pretty awesome. I have a basic story outlined out and I’m thinking how I want to write it. It’ll probably be done in smaller chapters like Sam and Max and the new Tales of Monkey Island series.
So, in adventure games, what kind of puzzles do you love, and what to you hate? What do you wish more adventure games would do that would make them more fun? Oh, and what do you think of the screenshots?
I much prefer puzzles that you can reason out, rather than arbitrary ones. Combining a rope with a magnet to retrieve a key from a sewer to open a warehouse door is logical. Giving a frozen meal to a vagrant so he throws it at a cat which runs though a hole into the warehouse, knocking over a candle which starts a fire resulting in the fire-brigade hacking down the door and so giving you entry… is my idea of a puzzle from hell!
I also prefer puzzles which can be solved with the items and information either to hand or which you’ve already encountered. I don’t much like puzzles that force you to visit 50 locations collecting items which you weren’t allowed to collect earlier, or which are impossible to solve until 20 minutes after they’re encountered when you finally learn the one fact that is vital to the solution.
Number/word/colour puzzles are ok, but rather dry and dull.
Hope this little rant helps
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