Well then! here are some screens I would have tried:



The biggest problems I'm having here are where to put the player's pokemon name when selecting your options. I just can't seem to place it somewhere convenient and aesthetically pleasing. Could make the window smaller if you wanted more space, and I replaced PKMN with SWITCH, because that's what you're really doing.
Your moves selection screen is easy, since you don't need to know your pokemon's name while selecting a move to use. Health and level you do need to consider though. You also don't need to see the entire of your opponent's pokemon sprite. Having all your moves' types and PP is also nice.
This one I could't get around. Writing works best horizontally, so what can I do.

I like having full backsprites though, and didn't realise until now Black & White have them. This one is obviously rushed; I made the flower fairly pretty and then got over it for his body. You get the idea.
Mine is a 32x32px image scaled x2 and shifted 4px horizontally. No idea if that's allowed, but it seems easy enough to code. Another 4px could be squeezed out on the Y axis if you wanted taller backsprites (doubled to 8px then). I could have easily just made it a 64x64px backsprite though, or indeed 72x64px.

Thanks for the advice, Pype!

Well, the reason I went with the darker colour on top is because that cupboard is as tall as the room, so I figured not much light could get to its top. That said, you are absolutely correct, as it is now it doesn't work well.
So I've done one lighter version (all top surfaces are all brighter than side surfaces, and side surfaces touching the screen edge are even darker, by the by) which definitely makes it more readable. I also made a darker version to imply that the cupboard is touching the "ceiling."



That girl is one of the characters I am going to use, so critiques on her would be appreciated. Here is her concept image:



As for the reorganising, I'll make sure to keep that in mind for the next scene (this one was more of a test in any case)!

Haha, glad I could be of help!

Your rocks issue has me intrigued. I once made some nice looking rocks and it must have been by pure chance because I couldn't replicate it afterwards.
Here they are for reference:


So I did a quick study (quick for me means an hours or so) on the effects of clusters and contrasts with regards to the "sharpness" of objects.
Here's how that turned out:


Basically -if you want sharper looking rocks- not only do you need straighter lines around your clusters (so essentially you'd be using skewed rectangles to draw your rocks), but you also need to keep the contrast high. Which is to say, putting your lights next to your darks separated only by a thin line or possibly nothing at all.
In the end I was able to give all my rock surfaces more awesome with nothing more than a few pixels (line or cluster) of the darkest shade to highlight (lowlight?) cracks or depressions.

And also remember, the closer the light source to your object, the less of the lightest colours will appear on your surface, so since the light source for Mana's rock wall there is quite far away, they've used lots of the two lightest shades (ie. the liberal use of pink), whereas your latest edit and my earlier edits have a closer light source (very close for mine) and so a lot less of the lighter shades.

Good luck!

Definitely an improvement! Looking awesome.
I'd say the lighting on the ground is a little too perfectly round. The lighting on the walls looks much more real. Also, why do the walls get so little detail compared to everything else? Poor things!

From a design point of view, I'd think prison bars shouldn't be bent, or they would be easy to escape from because bent metal is easy to bend more (not to mention the giants gaps any human could crawl through), but that's just a touch of realism. It's fantasy though, so anything goes.


Now, as for your rock wall problem. I tried my hand at a rock wall quickly using the colours from the image on the right (which I assumed were the colours you had to choose?), and then realised I am useless at imagining a rocky texture, so I made a spikey ball instead.
Then I realised that if you look at the spikey ball differently it could look like a rocky hole! Woo! Accidental thing that is good.



What I learned from this is that every colour/highlight is used exactly the same -to define the shape more- just in a lighter situation. I think you are just using your second lightest colour (the pink) incorrectly (and also you're missing an intermediate colour between it and the purple).
In the picture on the left they've used that pink very liberally with only a touch of orange after (my images do not do the same).

I'd say draw some irregular objects that you're used to drawing using that colour palette, and also try drawing a rocky wall with just grayscale (and perhaps only 4 shades). Then put the two together later.


Aaaand that's my 2 cents. Keep up the good work. ^^

If I understand correctly, are you basically layering horizontal sections of it instead of thinking of it as a sphere? Looks like your view is more of a top down view than mine. I think we both shaded it the same way though, I just sketched the whole thing out and did the shadows and then highlights but I was probably imagining it differently. I'll try that style too.

Ermm, I'm fairly poor at explaining myself, so I made pictures rather!
This is more or less how I would have shaded the tree ignoring bunches:


And then using the following technique I'd add bunches:


Starting with a simple round tree with simple shading.

Drawing an imaginary ellipse where a bunch should be.

Then, using the colours afforded to me by the larger shading (and adding a little more to both the high and low lights) I'd make bunches.


Mine was a bit more top down yeah, and I should also mention that the bottom half of your tree is shaded perfectly, you just needed more "volume" in the top half. Which just means less dark colouring because the higher part of the tree you'd expect to be a lighter colour on the whole (though actually if you look at tonnes of pictures of trees you wouldn't see that). That way the tree looks more solid (which again, they aren't IRL, but we're tricking eyes here, not going for realism).

I think.