Thanks pd, i appreciate all this help a ton. I'll do some refinements on the individual parts, try and fix my pallete issues some. I'm thinking the amber and green can work, i just need to do better than checkers for a pattern. Possibly an actual bg, might be worth the effort. I also gotta add a character too, so it loops without duplicates, i'll keep the math in mind for that too.
Gotta say, the ghost guy looks uh, not great from the side. Might be worth it to revise his design a bit, maybe give him a trail or something so he's not just a brown and black lolipop! The rest of this looks FANTASTIC though, you're really nailing the visuals here
I use aseprite for everything (because photoshop is ridiculously expensive on my budget) and has a MUCH more approachable interface. Photoshop, however, is way more powerful a tool for just about everything. Object-oriented animation and tweening capabilities very much trump Aseprite's limited animation capabilities, and until we get some better tools for that facet I'm gonna have to side with your friend if we're talking about professional work. If we're talking beginner work though, aseprite is a much better fit for the reasons above. It's interface is simply more intuitive and better-designed than Photoshop's.
It's kind of hard to read her arm overlaid on the wing as it is, I thought it was a part of the wing at first glance! Might be wise to change the positioning on that arm so it isn't blending in with the wing so much.
I got a bunch of ideas you could roll with. For example, some kind of mid-air spin-reflect could add some neat depth to it. Lasers can't be reflected, perhaps, but smaller missiles can. I'd have it be a very sensitive thing though, like fighting-game-parries sensitive or close to it so it's not just a spam-this-to-win thing. Elseways: Summons are always a fun time when you need just that little bit of extra help! Got a big robot friend? get him in there to shoot rockets and punch things. Got some homeless dude you know? He pops up and starts chucking molotovs and weaponized garbage. All kinds of good funtimes you can get with that! Some kind of flying sword leap for quick dodge-to-airs, and a ground-pound for the inverse, too. Maybe some ground-dodges too? Movement abilities are always fun to play around with, and for a game that's as hectic and bullet-hellish as this seems to be I'd say they're a must so the player doesn't feel cheated by unavoidable attacks.
EDIT: OH YOU MEANT FOR THE BOSS CHARACTER, DOI. Brace for amazingly ambitious ideas!
Ok, so some stuff for her could be phases. Starting and ending on just her with a sword facing against you, with the blade flurry as the midpoint I think. Starting bit isn't terribly difficult, maybe some counters or stun-attacks but nothing too fancy to build up the surprise of the sudden blade vortex. Then we go on to what you got here, with maybe a couple other patterns like a tracking circle of blades you have to find a gap in to not get hit by, or some kind of absolutely massive meteor-smash sword hurtling down from the sky with a shockwave as it hits. Then, once through that, she goes berzerker mode, drops the swordstorm, and starts just flurry-attacking you, and you gotta parry her more often than not since she's just ON YOU so much, doing short combos, parries, and launchers on you to keep the player on their toes.
Small flowers, big rocks, assorted debris... Depends entirely on environment. Like, if this is a grassy area outside a factory there'd be rusty metal bits and old springs. If a grassy patch in a forest there'd be tufts of tall grass/flowers/mushrooms, twigs, and the occasional root. More urban areas, things like cans and crisp wrappers.
Oof, flash. I should get a copy but it's such a pricy bit of software... Regardless though that's some excellent work, pile-driver. Thanks for the pointers! Do you have any tips specifically on the colors? Having troubles with that here since there's so many characters.
Actually, are there other programs with similar features to flash? Might be worth weighing my options, the software format is slowly losing support so it might be more helpful to start elsewhere.
Alright, so now I'm at a roadblock I don't think I'll be able to conquer through effort alone. Namely, stitching the foreground animation and animated background crawl together. I somehow need to get this: To scroll behind this: so that it LOOPS. I'm working in aseprite and no combination of frame timings, layering, and manual copypasting seems to be working, does anyone have any ideas?
Feel free to throw in other critique too, I really want to get this done well but I'm also VERY SPECIFICALLY looking for advice on stitching these two together.
AIGHT! I'm here with a (very) rough outline of what I mean. What I did here differently from yours is I put a bit more focus on the tentacles and ssubmersion, with the waves serving as a visual guide towards the text and tentacles under the water. I was a bit lost for what to do with the second line (probably should have just expanded the canvas) but hopefully this gives you some more ideas.
This isn't the GREATEST example of composition (it's something I myself am still figuring out, and it can be simultaneously highly specific and incredibly vague), with how unbalanced it is, but there's a few things I adhere to. Rule of thirds, sight rails (not sure the proper term, it's what I call it), and the use of contrast to pull on the eye.
For the former, rule of thirds is a thing I learned in photography, and is better explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds The second is something you can see on the tentacles here. I specifically bent the two biggest ones to lead into each other, drawing the eye down from the one on the bottom left into the tall one on the right, up to the spire, then over to the text (kinda flubbed that last bit, unfortunately.) I also gave them a specific shade of purple to offset from the blues of the ocean shadows, to further draw the eye. There's other visual effects I did too, like the lighting along the "leading edge" of the water surface to give the impression of a half-submerged camera and some mild 3d space to the water surface, but the primary thing I want to focus on are those things.
I do stress again though, I was lazy with this. The use of white for the light muddied up the readability of the text, which also should have been done in a better color to further contrast against the water riding down off the title and pull the eye towards it. A reddish browny-earthy hue might have worked for that, but alas. I also was INCREDIBLY lazy on the storm clouds, and initially planned to put in rain too, but alas.
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