[insane_cobra]

Looks good. Give us the damn game already!

[Steve Ince]

That screenshot looks fabulous.

[Maquisard]

Awesome graphics!

[Fien]

Originally Posted by Dasilva

I loved that game, I cant fnid it anywhere tough.

Ebay is your friend. Auction 8269854730.

[Zack]

I put that screenshot on my desktop background, just to see how it would look, and it looks amazing. That is definitely a really cool screenshot, and I hope it means the game is still being made.

[Maquisard]

One thing I noticed with that screeny though. I guess the characters won't be casting realistic shadows onto the backgrounds. See how the steps behind Mona look as if she isn't obstructing the light from the campfire? Not that I mind, as I certainly understand how splicing 2D and 3D together would be quite a conundrum...

[eriq]

They retouched and blurred parts of Mona on the new screenshot. It's obviously not an in-game action shot.

[Maquisard]

I thought as much, but I figure the in-game shots probably won't be getting much more complex.

[Orange Brat]

Originally Posted by Mares

One thing I noticed with that screeny though. I guess the characters won't be casting realistic shadows onto the backgrounds. See how the steps behind Mona look as if she isn't obstructing the light from the campfire? Not that I mind, as I certainly understand how splicing 2D and 3D together would be quite a conundrum...

It's a bit more involved than that. I'll let the man himself speak:

We draw the backgrounds on paper then scan that in and paint the set layers in Photoshop, with each plane on its own separate PSD layer. Then we save the separate layers as TGAs (Targa files) and turn them into textures, along with their alpha channels (transparent matted areas) in Maya, and then UV map the layers on to flat parallel polygons in Maya. Export that file into our engine, test it make sure it works. Then add particle affects and UV scrolling areas. Add the dynamic lights for the sets and 3d Character models. Import a separate set of geometry for the walk boxes, test that out. Then add all the interactive objects like doors and buttons and things like that. We use Maya to build the character meshes, rig them and to animate them. Nothing really exotic in this process. They only thing unusual is that we aren’t building 3d models for use as our sets, just 2d planes.

...and the drawing/coloring process....

I use paper and pencil, -marker paper to be precise. I sketch out five to eight small thumbnails to get a good design, and then scan that in to Photoshop (PS). I print the thumb nail drawing on my printer at 11 inches by 8.5 or some times 11 inches by 14 inches. Then I slip that under some marker paper, and then draw over that. The marker paper is thin enough to see through, but not too thin like tracing paper. Marker paper tends to hold a pencil drawing better.
Peter Chan used to use marker paper all the time so we ended up using it to sketch with and it was great. It is halfway between sketch book paper and tracing paper.
Then I sketch up all the elements and not worry how clean it is, but rather just concentrate on the design and composition.
When I am done with that I slip that under another piece of paper and then do the final clean line drawing. I use that as my guide when I paint. I scan that into PS when I am done.

I use Photoshop for all my color work. SO I place the sketch on the top PS layer and rough in my colors in a layer underneath. I lay done the medium value first then paint in the shadows, then the highlights last. then I tweak it with curves, value+contrast, and color balance till I think it looks good. I use the pint brush too generally at about 30% opacity. And layer the 'paint' on like real paint. That way you can kind of see the strokes in it. i never use airbrush or gradient fill. It just looks too artificial to me. I like the hand painted look.

...and a little more...he likes to write and in detail ....

The Game will be in 3d, but not look like Escape from monkey Island. By the way EMI could have looked a lot better and still be in 3d, just look at Grim Fandango. But the problem was the lack of experience in the Art Director, who is great guy and very, very good animator- one of the best I have seen. But Peter Chan, Bill Eakan and I are all very experienced illustrators so that is why all the previous Lucas Adventure Games looked so good. The EMI Art director was an animator so things like color and lighting were not his specialty. But there were plenty of good artist in that team, especially Kathy Hseih, and Eddie Del Rio.

So AVS will be in 3d BUT,,,,not the way you think. I am a big fan of the early Disney movies, and one Oscar winning short in particular really influenced me. It was called The Old Mill. http://disney.go.com/vault/archives/...l/oldmill.html It was mood film, meaning it didn’t really have plot, but for good reason. It wasa test film for a new technique called multiplane camera. So we are going to do is make a virtual multiplane camera using your PC’s 3d card. The backgrounds will be painted in 2d but placed on 3d planes. This will allows us to keep the backgrounds looking 2d and hand painted, but we get to vreate the illusion of depth and perspective. It wil be really nice. I have already doen test, that isn’t ready to show but it looks good. I want to polish the test up and bit an dthen I will post it in the gallery section.

The characters will be 3d however, and there are so many good reasons to do this. First, 3d models save on animation time, though the time modeling the characters probably negates this benefit. Mona is an asymmetrical- meaning she isn’t even on both sides- character which would have been cost prohibitive to do in 2d. With 3d models it is easy to zoom in an do close ups during cut scenes and dialogue. This will allow us to do more subtle acting with her facial expressions, though, as I have been taught by Joe Ranft, never rely solely on facial expression when doing acting.

Also we want to make changes to her outfits during the game. If we did this in 2d we’d have to redo all her animations- at least two months worth of work! In 3D we just change the model and use the same animations. With 3d models we get use dynamic lighting, which will darken and light the models correctly based on where they stand, and the light can vary in value like a torch flame or a flashing light. We can also use a lot great 3D effects that would have been expensive in 2d such as rain, snow, water, moving clouds and real time light blooming.

3d characters and animation is just so powerful we can’t not do it. And those of you who are a bit cynical and think we are doing 3D animation to increase sale- well in some ways your right, we do want adventure games to reach as many people as possible, and if 3d helps do that, great, but it is absolutely not the main reason at all. I have just been doing 3d animated games since 1997 (Indy Infernal Machine, Bounty Hunter, Full Throttle II, The Two Towers, The Suffering, LA Rush) and it is the medium I am used to. Going back to purely 2d animation is too confining and time consuming. Don't get me wrong. i love 2d animtion like my friends Gendy Tartikovsky, Brain Andrews and Paul Ruddish did on Samuri Jack and Clone Wars. But for us, in games, 3d is such a great tool.

But rest assured the backgrounds will look very 2D, hand painted by me, MAria Bowen and Bill Eaken. It should look great. This I am not worried about. What I worry about is the length of the game and if it is funny enough. Those are the two things that keep me up at night. But art doesn’t.

I will probably devote a page about this subject on the AME web site soon, probably make a video. I get asked this question all the time so I figure I should just do a video and send people the link.

They retouched and blurred parts of Mona on the new screenshot. It's obviously not an in-game action shot.

Where is this mentioned? It might have been retouched(i.e. airbrushed) after being captured, but who is to say it isn't taken during gameplay? That's obviously a realtime dynamic light on her...gourand shading and all.

[Orange Brat]

The Creative Director at Autumn Moon, Bill Tiller, made a few posts on the official forum today:

As it stands now it looks like late 2007, possible very early 2008, but that has yet to be finalized. That’s all I can say right now. I’d love to tell you more and tell you it will be sooner but that is the reality right now and I don’t want to B.S. any of you. Game development just takes a while as we all know now. Hopefully we will be worth the wait. We plan to be.

By the way ‘no news’ doesn’t mean ‘bad news, in this case it means good news- it means we are too busy getting ready and working on the game that we don’t have time to post big updates. But trust me! We will have big up date hopefully very, very soon- and if all goes well, it will be a BIG update! : ) Again I don't want to make any promises but things look real good right now.

Yes, the publishers we have and are still talking to all want to do localization in all the big markets, France included. I would insist on that anyway. Subtitles are ok for a while but there is really no reason other than cost not to do native language versions, plus there shouldn’t be lip sync problem if phoneme lip sync software is developed, something we want to do and plan on, though I can’t guarantee it yet. Still going over features we can keep and not have in order to fit in our budget and development time.

[Karmillo]

So they actualy have publishers? thats good