Topics

1) You already gained significant experience by successfully developing a few freeware Sierra-remakes and, more specifically, in using AGS before developing Al Emmo. Compared to the development of your previous games, what would you say were the most difficult and/or surprising problems that you encountered whilst developing your first commercial adventure game?

2) Many game developers grow to hate the games they have worked on. Partly this is due to the long working hours, unreasonable deadline and publisher milestones (which probably isn't a factor for you), the tedium of completing uninteresting but essential tasks and the sheer repetition of having to work on the same areas of the game again and again (and again...) Did you experience this type of developer burn out? If not, how did you avoid it?

I have a few questions about the process of creating the background art for Al Emmo and I hope that this is the correct forum to ask them in. I'm sure that many people would be interested in reading the answers to these questions and I hope that someone can spare a little time to answer them.

Are the backgrounds 100% digital art or traditionally drawn/painted and then scanned? Perhaps traditionally drawn, scanned and then coloured digitally?

What steps do you take from the initial concept to producing the final artwork? And how long does it typically take to produce a background?

What art materials do you use? And what software (perhaps Photoshop or GIMP?) and art-related hardware (graphic tablets? Which kind?)

Have you learned anything from the experience of creating the background art for Al Emmo? Would you do anything differently for future products? Do you feel that your artistic skills have improved?

How many people were responsible for creating the background art? If it was more than one person then was it difficult to achieve artistic/stylistic consistency between the works of different artists?

Would you say that producing the art assets for the game was one of the most time consuming parts of creating Al Emmo?

I'm pleased that you've chosen to use AGS' maximum resolution of 800x600 but even this can seem rather low res and chunky these days - particularly for those of us who use LCD monitors (or laptops) which don't natively support this resolution. On both my laptop and my desktop's LCD monitor, 800x600 looks quite terrible; either 'scaled up' and blurry to fit the screen or in a small 'cramped but sharp' un-scaled box in the centre of the screen, surrounded by large black borders.

I know that many people might say that "it's not about the visuals" and that "low-res is old skool, dude!", but that's not very helpful when you're trying to make a profitable, commercial product, right? For commerical games, visual quality is king,

I can completely understand why you might have used AGS for Al Emmo - your familarity with it must have helped to shorten development time and minimise problems - but, perhaps, it would be in your long term best interests to think about migrating to another system?

I guess, in my own long winded way, I'm asking if you've considered or experimented with other adventure creation systems, for example Wintermute or AGAST, which make use of higher resolutions, or if you're planning to stick with AGS for the forseeable future?