Yay monochrome tilesets  (excuse my enthusiasm, I've been a hacker/developer on the TI-84+ for years and generally have had only monochrome restrictions to work with, so I've personally done a ton of monochrome graphics)  The tiles themselves are nice; they use up their 16x16 space well, but don't use it too well to the point where everything just looks black -- however this is a bit noticeable with the flower tiles, I would suggest taking out a ring of black pixels inside of them to have them stand out less against the rest of the tiles (the flowers are noticeably the darkest tiles in the whole scene).  House looks great, cliffsides look just as great.  stairs are a bit bland, but I'm not sure what you can really do to fix them.  And one thing I noticed:



Those circled trees are unique from the rest, and seemingly each other too.  Most awkward ones are the ones circled in the top right.

As for map design:  map is a bit plain right now.  however, I have no idea what the screen size of the device this is for is, so I'll assume it's not PC if you're going for monochrome graphics, and therefore is something well below 640x480 (unless it's a really old school PC game, trying to emulate the feel of older monochrome-screened handhelds?)  I'll assume it's something like 192x128, so double the 84+'s screen size, probably a fair guess.  In which case, the open space of empty tiles and cluttered areas of tree tiles become a bit noticeable and make the map feel rather empty.  If it's something as small as the 84+'s screen of 96x64, then this map design is nothing but trouble; things are pretty spaced out, and since you'll only see 4x6 tiles at a time, you'd probably get lost in the map.

So, basically, it needs more detail tiles for sure, but based on the screen size you may want things to be closer together.

Quick color switch to see if we're thinking the same thing:



(I just used GiMP to edit the colors; I'm going to have to do a manual (like I have been doing), decent color swatch when I do the color switch for real, but for now I just wanted to get an idea out there quick)

I personally still favor the more dull one, but perhaps this quick switch has too much contrast for your taste as well, and therefore I need to experiment and find a middleground.

Don't worry, I'm seeing all of your edits, but there's a lot (which is really great -- I feel I'm learning a lot this time around especially) but I can only fix/edit/respond per each recommendation as I incorporate it

Anyways here's what had this morning, and after about 30 minutes of tinkering this is what I have now:



I apologize for the 2x zoom on this, but that's how I'm planning on displaying it eventually on dA/PJ; so, I'm trying to look at it at the right zoom level throughout the whole process to keep in mind that idea.

@jengy: At first I thought your suggestion was dumb, since I had the anatomy right already... but then I realized how wonderful your idea was.  You'll notice that I rounded out the butt more in my latest quick edit, and it looks a lot more interesting now.  I've never taken any art classes before, so I have next to no teaching on perspective (I'm going to fix that this summer however!), but from that simple edit you made I feel I've already learned to think in more of a cross-planar way, so that every plane (i.e. the one created by the back legs/butt, the side of her coat, the ones created by the sections of her face) works together with the other planes in a fluid motion.

@yaomon17: not exactly the style I'm going for, but I find it interesting how you shaded the tail in general (same with the mane), it'll help me when I finally get around to taking what has been Ai's suggestion for a few posts now and make it into reality

@Ai:  Not a fan of the dithering in the shadow, but I think I may have to add a darker shadow shade in there somewhere to define it better.  Thanks for the tips on the colors, it prompted me to "research" into color theory at school today, and I changed the palette around a lot.  I think that after this edit that I've gotten much better at picking colors with the H/S/L values, and I've realized that I was using insanely saturated colors (and I played with them as a result).  I didn't like how you used blue as the outline, I settled with more of a color that had a hue closer to the orange color (it ended up being something like a hue of 230 IIRC) and I think it's a bit less radical against the orange while still having the shadowy effect.

@Regulus Awesome: I would do MLP-styled clouds, but first of all those are really simple and boring (IMHO), and I want to kind of place Scootaloo in a bit more realistic environment ^_^


As for what I know I still need to do for sure:

- Anti-alias clouds completely
- FIX HER TAIL!  (been lazy on this one, I'll admit)
- Anti-alias different shades in Scootaloo, A-A her against the BG very slightly, and selout her outline (on second thought... just read a few topics here about selout.  Probably not a good idea to use it for this, or really at all.  Helm seems to condemn it for making ugly pixel art, and from the insight he gave I'm just dropping the idea)
- make the water actually look like water, by adding some simple waves or something
- play around with her shadow some more
- fix up the cloud she's standing on
- a few birds in the background or something to fill up the space in the top left corner better (or maybe another cloud)
- maybe play around with her facial expression some more.


I think a fair gauge for the completedness of this is probably around 60% ^_^ I'm excited with how this is turning out, and the incredible amount of things I'm learning from you guys.  I honestly have no idea how I'd learn so fast without you.

I think that for the amount of detail you have right now, that the room needs to shrink significantly in size for it to really be interesting to the player.  In addition, it needs to be smaller because in real life, the size of the person compared to the size of the room would make that room really huge.  And, really empty.  That rug alone would be the largest rug I would have ever seen in my lifetime.  While designing an environment to be lifelike-proportional doesn't usually work out well in cartoony styled games like this seems to be (a more realistic size for the room would be about 1/4 the size it is now), one should also not make the environment huge, especially if it's that lacking of detail.  Maybe shrink it to half the size?  That way it's also easier to make it more interesting with less props in the environment.

On that topic, the fridge/drawers look about the right size, but those boxes and that scroll are really huge.  

EDIT: just noticed that mockup wasn't by the OP my bad then.