Hi Rybar, welcome to Pixelation.
What would you say is a real-world geological equivalent to the area you are producing? I ask because the rocky transition from smooth grass to deep blue water is a little strange to me. Seems like something man-made, such as a canal. Whatever kind of landscape you're emulating, find some reference material to help you. My suggestion is to add more of a transition of depth of the water from shallow to deep.
Colours are kind of archetypal. Very green grass, very blue water. It creates a lot of contrast and draws the eye heavily to the water. This is going to be problematic for the visual priority of your game. You need the actual game elements like the player, enemies, bullets and powerups to absolutely stand out, so you'll have to cut down the contrast for your background, I say.
Luckily, there's a great opportunity to unify the colours due to
aerial perspective. Harmonise the colours by tinting them towards some ambient hue. The
Dodonpachi CC might be a cool thing to check out to see a
couple of
excellent examples of this. Not only will this improve the visual priority, it will bring unity to the colours and keep your colour count down.
The water itself more resembles the choppiness of open water, such as an ocean. There's no indication of flow that a channel of water like this would have. The water near the shore would be hitting the land and be impeded, creating resistence which would manifest as kind of waves parallel to the flow. If that makes any sense. Find some reference!
Quite a bit of noisiness going on with the pixels, particularly the shoreline. Looks like you took to it with a spray can. Think more about how the grass would interact with the rocks, what kind of transition would form, and what kind of light that would create when viewed from high above. Maybe it would look like this... but I have a feeling there's a better solution.
