My first pixel art creations

[DavidBowers]

These are my first forays into pixel art, and more or less digital art in general. They are quite small since they were designed for what will hopefully someday be a mobile game. 

[Decroded]

was this inspired by the old arcade game called Joust?
man that game was fun.

[DavidBowers]

Yes it was, Joust was one of my favourite games and a programmer and I were working towards making a updated, multiplayer version that could be played on a touch screen. We had made good progress until he had 2 kids. Now i need another programmer. In the meantime, I want to finish/improve the art assests.

I wanted the gameplay and overall feel of the game to be as close to the original as possible. The level was not designed in Pixel art, but feel free to tell me what you think about it anyways:

[Decroded]

ha kick-ass idea 
when I get time I'll look at ur sprites cant see too good on my phone but one I wonder are the people and jousting sticks too small?
i wonder if this scale might affect the action.
I never saw this image until now but I always imagined a scale like this when I was playing.



I also imagined the birds as looking more like ostriches where as it kinda seems u based ur designs on more common small birds?

[DavidBowers]

Cool pic! That is a valid point, and the best answer I can give is I'm not sure. The character and the lance are the 2 things that will determine the hit boxes, so if the lance and characters are bigger presumably they would have to be adjusted as well?

In retrospect when I was designing them I was trying to imagine how much weight a bird could realistically carry and designed the knights to suit. Given the context of the game and how ridiculous everything in it is, that was probably a mistake...

[Decroded]

well please dont take my word as fact or anything its all subjective but yeah i think its always good to consider other views and decide for urself.
i suspected u were letting logic and realism dominate ur design decisions and yeah I agree the game kinda needs a bit of ridiculousness actually.
it doesnt need to even be set on earth with our gravity for example if that helps u justify it in ur own mind 

ultimately, gameplay is king so its not a bad idea to consider hitboxes as u sprite.
how far have u got with coding?
because I personally find it helpful to do a rough prototype sprite then add a 50% layer with the hitboxes/masks showing.
I like to toggle the hitboxes in-engine and see what works then in my graphics editor I can use that as a reference to buld the animations.

[DavidBowers]

I think it's too late to make them all bigger, at the moment since it's only me and there's alot of other stuff to be made I think I'd be better off finishing what was started to at least get something I can release. Then post release I can tweak, but it's definitely something I will keep in mind.

Did you notice anything else? Poor colours, hard to make out a certain detail, clumsy animation, etc?