Much more 3D looking with the highlight and the consistent shading. -- Remember, light doesn't move around that often in real life, and with pixels, all you're doing is simulating where the light falls and how it reflects or diffuses. The key term there is "reflects" because that's what you're simulating with pixels. It will either reflect fully or break apart across the surface (scattering like lots of tiny ball-bearings).

The only difference with pixels vs. real life or a 3D program is that you have an additional job as an artist:

Make it *read* well.

So keep in mind that there are planes on the body of your subjects -- they are 3D forms -- and the light hits some of these areas more directly than others. In the places where the light doesn't hit directly, unlike in a 3D program or reality, you can play with the highlights and shadows to give it the kind of "read" you want it to have so that it comes across better to others.

In your turret animation, there is a LOT of detail around the mouth (too much for that fast of an animation), and because the turret crosses that area, there's way too much happening there as it passes. You'd be better off putting ALL of that area of the face in light or shadow just below the beak and ignore any details there.

You need to think ahead at the entire animation when you're animating something complex like this -- especially at this resolution -- because when forms overlap, you can have lots of confusing stuff going on that the eye can't read when there are too many details happening in the same place.

The only other thing I could mention about the animation is the pupils appear to translate into the top of the beak, passing them (the pixels) on to the other eye (remember the part where I said to think ahead?) so that the pupil doesn't read as a pupil but instead as a shifting blob of dark moving across the entire face. You could lighten the top of the beak's outline a lot (use the same color as the eyebrows on the top of the beak) and this would fix it. The problem is that the pixels are TOO close to the same luminosity (no matter if their HUE is different, the luminosity trumps hue everytime in terms of readability.)

Lastly, remember to vary your color choices -- the highlights across the metal surface should be tinted with the same color as the light in the scene. Most people use yellow tints, but you can vary it up with red or purple or really anything -- but the key is to NEVER use solid grays unless you need them to stand in and absorb the colors from nearby hues (essentially acting as a stand-in shade when you need it to be that level of luminosity for multiple color hues -- great trick btw!)

I really like the fat chick animation, but it looks like it's hopping and waddling more than flying. You can actually fix this by simply making the wing sharper at the point in the animation where it's midway and entirely down, making the upward curve toward the tip of the wing at the point where the wing lifts fully actually oppose itself when it goes down.

The fat effect comes from the belly being pushed forward when its body lands, but in fact, that's precisely where the wing should push forward and come to a point opposing the downward momentum (the eye reads the belly as it expects to read the wing, and therefore it comes off as acceptable even though the brain knows there's something wrong... weird how this stuff works, isn't it? lol)

That's all I've got for now. Nice improvements though man! Keep it up!

The outline pops the volume a bit too much, and then with the highlights, it just makes her look like a wet bubble/plastic toy person.

You said you hue-shifted, but you need to give MORE toward some particular color and try some different varieties in hues if you want to push it further. Colors are meant to be played with, so do it. You'll be proud of yourself when you find just the right shades for your highlights and your shadows.

In this particular piece, I'd say bring the *brightness/specularity* down on her highlights, to a luminosity closer to her midrange color (or use the midrange color as AA to the highlight color OR remove one or the other color altogether, though the former is nicer-looking than the latter, depending on whether you're going for 16 or 8 bit respectively).

She needs some color in the brightest highlight of her hair -- i.e. if she's standing in the sun, move that a LOT more toward yellow on the hue spectrum (but don't make it the color of a lemon of course). Also the staff's yellow could use a lot more saturation to meet up with the saturation of the clothing.

Hope this helps.

Her hand is above her head, but there are no shadows casting anywhere from her arm, so you might want to address that.

Glad you went ahead and posted it. I was where you were at one time, and it took me posting, doing weekly challenges, and reading lots of other people's topics before I got the hang of everything I needed. The weekly challenges were the most helpful for me though, in terms of execution -- it made me pull my head out of my own work to see it the way others would see it, not to mention the 'challenge' part teaching me how to manage colors.

Speaking of managing colors, Square did this really well -- the reason the sprites are near-unreadable when you zoom in close is because they pack a lot of detail in a small space with those colors. The reason they read well is because Square put in a lot of trust to the CRT televisions that these games would be played on. The CRT's would blur the pixels together and you'd essentially be 'painting' with light because the CRT's would naturally blend them and make them look more organic, so you never really saw what the squares themselves looked like -- you'd just be 'painting' a picture!

Nowadays this is rarely the case because everything is so HD that a blurry pixel is considered a negative thing. Even in pixel art for games on the PC, it's rare to find this kind of 'detail' packed into a single sprite because it tends to look muddy or jaggy unless zoomed way out to where you can barely see the pixels (OR you can use a nice CRT filter possibly? )

Anyway, C+C:

Your characters don't look bad at all form-wise. You've pretty much got the look. The guy leaning against the wall is a nice touch too! The only real issue is your color choices -- you need some sense of hue-shifting (i.e. shifting toward the color of the light source for highlights and shifting toward the color of shadows for the shadows)

The biggest and most glaring issue with this besides the lack of detail or direction in the environment (relative to the size of the screen!) is the washed out colors and the abundant over-use of dithering!

Tiles can be tricky in general (due to their modularity) and tend to be the bane of my existence in regards to pixel art, but they follow *most* of the same rules that characters do -- with some exceptions:

Firstly, the perspective is orthographic (that is, depth is not really depth but height, depending on the overhead angle you choose), whereas characters can just about be at any angle and the viewer won't care.

Second, the characters MUST stand out, so tileset colors and details should *never* overpower the characters. Therefore you had the right idea to keep the BG somewhat desaturated, but at a certain point, "desaturation" == "uninteresting", so it is a constant balancing act between characters and their BG tiles!

Finally, you NEVER want stray (single) pixels in a BG tile because it draws the viewer's attention (think of how people are naturally able to see faces in ordinary things such as an electrical outlet or a car's grill and headlights) -- a stray pixel is like "hey, there might be a face over here!" and your eye is drawn to it -- and this is why extensive dithering is a no-no, /especially/ on repeating tiles. It's distraction city.


In regards to THESE specific tiles, you might want to make some kind of portholes to the outside world on the train (most trains have windows to prevent claustrophobia in its passengers) and perhaps some other bits and bobs laying about.

You'll want to also use some blues in the gray walls and purples in the red floors to show that there's some semblance of night outside (assuming you put windows in, or if there's ambient light bouncing around ANYWHERE in the train).

Finally, you'll want to establish a light source. It's clear you've got a Chrono Trigger 'inspiration' there, but even this game had a variety of shades to indicate the light on the floor and walls. Go look at one of the maps of Crono's room both before and after opening the window in his room. That should give you a hint of how to light an area with tiles.

Also, one final note about 16bit tiles -- even though many games appeared to use them as 16x16 squares, most tiles were actually 8x8 and worked into one another to help define things like shadows, borders, rims of objects, and other smaller bits and bobs hiding in the shadows. You should see the Star Ocean "commercial critique" thread here on the forums to see some of the tilesets they used in that. It should give you an idea of how these sorts of tilesets are setup.

Hopefully this helps! Good luck -- and great taste in games dude!

The shape and outline looks really good. I cant make any other critiques though since you have no indication of form or material.

You might want to consider looking at 3D art or life photos to see how the shadows and light fall on whatever sort of material you're trying to approximate here.

In the case of a typical felt hat (as I'll assume you were going for), you'd want to add some shadowing to indicate the planes where the light does NOT fall (i.e. the shadows and darker areas) and this trick works in general, no matter what material you seek to replicate since the only real changes are usually how the highlight falls and the size and intensity of its specularity.

The number of colors for shadowing usually does NOT depend on quality but instead depends on how far into the distance and what material is being used for the shape/form. In the case of a felt hat, the 2 colors you have there are sufficient for most of the form, but you could add a 3rd color to indicate the shadow area I mentioned above (and possibly a 4th to blend with the main grey color of the hat.)