Thought this could be a cool design, so I gave this a shot while I have a few minutes.
IDK whats up with the mixed resolution on these. Unless you have a very good reason for it that's something you want to avoid in all future pixels. Clean it up completely at 2x or just go 1x. The color ramps in the sprite are pretty mono, also too low contrast and you're using more colors than you need. These are pretty common beginner mistakes but pretty easy fixes.
Don't worry about the dithering yet, pretty sure it needs less, not more (see below).
Here I cut the colors down to 10, and brought the contrast up. Also used flatter areas of color (bigger "clusters", see jacket fur), a more contrasty palette in the first place makes this step more efficient and readable. You'll find both are also way easier to manage for animations. Zoom in and compare these. If you want to learn some of the reasoning behind clusters and are up for a longer read, see
this post too.
BTW there are cases when these things do not come down purely to style and it doesn't matter if it's at 1x or 2x. Value contrast and simplification are fundamental design principles that bring the character/asset/whatever out or push it into the background.
Sword & Sworcery/
Hyper Light Drifter etc. etc. etc.... used contrast extensively even within a flatter style similar to what you might be emulating, so they look unique even within those constraints. Use dithering, etc. after you get the sprite looking good.
Here is how I handled the walking animation. See that it's a lot easier to tell what is moving with higher contrast built into the palette. There is some
follow-thru here, but there could be more.
Here's how I would handle your lighting suggestions. 2 variants, quickly done.
This gets pretty tricky to animate when doing variations. Consider painting in the light source (if your program has layers and 8-bit alpha support) and indexing down from that for each frame if you're on a time budget. Just be aware that it could be considered a "cheat" and frowned upon by some guys, but whatever gets the job done faster works for me.
Some brief backstory might also help clarify the design, and let you/us know what should go where.
Keep it up man, looking forward to seeing something in the Animation subforum later