How we make our graphics

Tuesday, 12 January 2010 abstauber

Hurray, a new year has begun, we started working on our shadow trip again – so why not telling an inside story about Pixel Art!

I’ve chosen this background, because I made it completely by mouseclicks. No drawings, no tablet, no scans. In other words, you just need patience and almost no talent.

As for the program, you can use everthing that supports layers and pixel. I’ve used Photoshop 7 (pencil tool, 1x), but paint.net, The Gimp or GraphicsGale are up for the task as well.

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A story about snowflakes

Tuesday, 14 July 2009 abstauber

Storytelling, maybe one of the best parts of the game creation… if it just weren’t about adventure games. Okay, it’s still fun, but you have to look out not to leave the gameplay behind.

And after collecting some nice ideas and puzzles there’s still the hurdle to connect it all to one good story.

Here’s one method, that helped me a lot to get out of the writers block – it’s called “Snowflake Method”.

All in all you begin with cramming you whole story into one short sentence. After that you get 4 more sentences to mark the cornerstones. If you’ve finished all steps, you’ll get a nice skeleton you can stick to. Also it helps you to rethink the whole thing from a whole new position. Well, see for yourself, here’s the link:

http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/snowflake.php

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Eyecandy

Friday, 10 July 2009 abstauber

Well, I think it’s time to post something here.
(and please, don’t compare my translation to the original 😛 )

First of all, thanks for all cheering comments we’ve recieved so far. I’m having a hard time, not to spoil even more stuff 😉

So for now, it’s only small news from the dev kitchen

Anno 2008, AGS Forums’s KhrisMuc released a small module (btw. thanks again!), which made it possible to dissolve stuff in AGS. And in the meantime, even ShattenReyze managed to get far enough to actually have usage for that module.
Unfortunately the module never come out of the alpha phase, so I had to go back to Scriptopia, in order to rewrite this thing.

And that’s how it looks today:

Incredibly ugly ;D
But I promise, it’s much more appealing, when you see it moving.

Anyway it’s working pretty good and it can also be the base for a lot interesting puzzles.
Right now I’m thinking of hourglasses or bad guys who slowly teleport in the way of the player.

I’m pretty excited to get my hands on those new puzzles 🙂

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Site launched

Tuesday, 30 June 2009 abstauber

Hello and Welcome!
After quite some time, it’s finally time to launch this homepage.
It’s still a little empty here, as the content will be added little by little. In the near future myself and probably others are going to post impressions from the development of ShattenReyze and, apart from that, we’ll add lots of infos about this game its story.
So please don’t hesitate to check back later.

And again, please enjoy your stay!

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Hello, World.

Sunday, 7 June 2009 Bundeskanzler Krang

The first post and google friends are welcome to participate.