Probo:

Yes, that's a flying enemy and it's supposed to be pretty much what you said. A variation on the walking one above it.

Can you explain a bit more about what you meant by needing some perspective to fix the flatness of the science equipment? I'm not sure how to add perspective when it's viewed straight on like that.

ErekT:

Thanks!

I really like your edits. The added movement in the shooting anim really improves it, and it's amazing how much smoother the run looks! Nice work on that, I'm gonna study it carefully to see what I can learn from it 

Thanks for the tip about not trying to cram too much detail in too, I'll definitely keep that in mind.

Hi everyone, I released an indie game a few months ago and was hoping to get some critique on the graphics. This was the first time I'd seriously attempted pixel art (or any graphics for that matter) so there's many things I'm not happy with but overall I'm pleased with how it turned out.

I spent a lot of time reading threads here and picked up so much good info I can't begin to thank you guys enough for this fantastic resource and the generous sharing of advice from all the regulars.

The game is a sci-fi flavoured action adventure, inspired by many of the classic games of the Amiga and other home computers. Besides lots of reading here and studying Arne's art tutorial and so on, I spent a lot of time closely examining graphics from old games (mostly Amiga but other platforms too) but didn't restrict myself to the technical limits of those platforms.

Here's a few screenshots of the game:




(Background clearly inspired by Flashback  )








(Tiles were recycled a lot with different palettes)




Some tileset examples:


(Background)


(Foreground)


And some sprites:


The player idle pose and some variations for other crew members. I was fairly happy with how these turned out, but someone mentioned the pose made the player look like an orangutan


The player run cycle. Some of the individual frames are a bit messy. I found this quite hard, and just constantly placed and removed pixels until it looked ok, without much of an overall vision of how it should look. After a lot of iterations I ended up with this. When running down stairs it often looks as if he's running backwards for some reason.


Climbing ladder animation. This was singled out in a review as being particularly awkward and funny! 
This one was also particularly hard, since everything else I'd drawn up until this was side-on. It was a struggle to translate the look of the side-on view to behind, probably again because I was just endlessly shuffling pixels until it looked ok, without a clear idea of the character's appearance.


Pretty happy with this one.

Some enemies:



I really don't like the mouth on this one but couldn't come up with anything better. Overall it seems very "flat" and bland too.


Some props:


I'm happy with this except for the broken glass, which doesn't look very good.




This is supposed to be some scientific equipment that is found in various locations. This one looks too flat and bland as well.

Any C&C would be great. Is there anything that stands out that I should work on to improve for my next game?

Thanks in advance!
Matt.