@Fuzzyleaves:
Adarias is right, in the fact that it is a trick/technique to make the barrel more appealing. In the south-facing sprites, the barrel is slightly widened near the tip to portray a certain amount of depth. As the barrel is in the air and pointed toward the viewer. Just a simple mechanic to get a little more perspective out of an otherwise rigid point of view.
@Stefano:
Thanks for the edit, man. I see what you've done, and definitely appreciate the changes. I think the eyes in your edit suffer from a lack of eyelashes, or rather, a darker color to represent eyelashes. Which kind of gives them this albino/simpleton/stoned kind of expression. But, the placement and sizing are on point for sure. I like what you've done to the mouth. That's akin to what I was hoping to achieve, but I couldn't quite get it before. Aside from deviating a bit from the facial planes I devised, I gather that you just applied general smoothing and polish to the piece, which I can definitely take some pointers from in future scenarios. In the end, it's a very good edit, although I do feel that it strays away from the simple and precise shading of the original. Something that has been put into effect because these avatars will actually be constructed via layers of the individual pieces that make up the face.
I'm not actually done with this game, as I've got a fair amount of avatars to clean up yet. In addition to formulating a decent base for the female characters. I'm currently on a new project atm, so my time to do such is limited, but I'll most likely post progress as it comes. Something I hope to learn from this is properly portraying racial characteristics. One, for the learning experience, and two, so that all players of this game are afforded facial features that acknowledge their place in humanity. I'm sure that it's pretty easy to be subjective about how good or accurate those characteristics are, so I don't think I'm quite done with this topic yet.