Heya Xerus!

I made an edit to your image.


I made changes to your palette so that there's more contrast and color saturation, and added a fourth shade to your rocks. Your colors were pretty good, they just needed a bit more nitpicking to make the foreground areas to stand out more as in front.

Also I redid the block pattern for fun. I'm not fully impressed with the patterns I made, but it's the best I could come up with on short notice. Point being, your blocks need a little more character

I hadn't really edited your dude at all, he looks pretty good for the most part.

<3 this. Keep up the good work!

I like the palette shift change a lot, I think the block tiles though look a little off to me.  Although at this point I've been looking at this thing for so long that I don't know what looks right at all! 

Xerus, do you 'need' to have rocks? Why not just go with dirt, it would likely more commonly be found directly underneath grass anyway, and you could probably accomplish a smoother, cleaner, and flatter look with the dirt, because the grass on the side looks like it is pushing on the screen, like a clean cut cross section.

I don't think the rocks are cutting it, although you might want to experiment with tile variation if you're not fond of the repeating patterns, if you haven't already.

I guess I don't need to have rocks, but having the solid brown didn't really look that pleasing to me.  I guess I went straight for rocks because I didn't really know where else to go with it...

Charming mockup. Not diggin the overall jittery noisiness of grass, trees, sky. Hopefully just a WIP issue.

Arrghh, you're not?  The grass trees and sky were my favorite parts...    Any suggestions?

Add contrast to the different depth layers.
My suggestion would be to make the foreground darker and the background lighter.
Keep the "middleground" with the character and the top of the "grass" and the two trees the color you've got now.

Alrighty, I'll give that a go.

Also, here are some edits done by members of a different forum:

from "Evil-ville"


from "Jim"

So now I just have to figure out how to take all the feedback I've gotten and apply it to the image... oh ho, not an easy task...

I seem to have problems at crafting even the simplest ground tiles to have some sort of coherent style.  I really like where the grass is going on the bottom set, but I'm having a hard time making the ground underneath it match. I don't want it to just be a solid ground color under the grass, but I'm not really sure what to do other than rocks.

After working on the tiles in the upper part of the image, I realized that they are pretty damn noisy and therefore ugly, so I went for more of a sloppy/blobby/paintery style with the grass below that.

I don't really know exactly what I'm looking for here, but maybe just a little guidance on how to approach the ground below the grass, or any comments on any of it that might be helpful to me.  I've never ventured that far out of the realm of super lo-fi stuff and I want to make my next project look as good as I can possibly make it! 

Updates:

The thing with the square tile-sized bricks in the middle of the dirt is that it makes your game look like cave story and/or the underside. Seriously. Also, I don't think it fits your style! Go crazy with pillars and greek-y stuff in the upper levels of the piece instead, that was much more pleasant to the eye IMO. Don't bother with the under-earth, the player isn't going to interact with anything there so there's no acute need for visual information there.

Okay so having just the brown void is fine?  That was going to be my original route, but people seemed to be against that...

Mike: Thanks for the feedback and the edit!  The character is in a pretty early phase (only that one sprite exists of him so far) so I'll most likely be working on this issue.  I kinda wanted the scarf to be super huge/covering his chin though! ;p

I will now post an image.



Ugh the readability in that one blows.



Try that, perhaps?

Here's another attempt!



I think I may be starting to head in the right direction, but still stumbling around in some areas.