Hello!

I recently participated in my second 24-hour college game jam (first one to actually end up with a playable game at the end) and I thought I would submit the character art I did here to get some advice on where to go. Our randomly selected project was "Space Monkey Platformer" so that's why there's space suit monkeys everywhere. I'm less happy than usual on these guys, but granted we were working under a time limit and it takes me forever to put out even this, I think it would be valuable just to hear any and all critiques/advice/suggestions/serve-me-up-some-butt-whoopin'-pixel-art-justice type comments.

I've done an okay body of pixel art over the past few months, and I'm drawing in my sketchbook every day to try and find a style I'm happy with, but I'm just not quite there yet. I've got inklings of what I'm comfortable with and what appeals to me, but I really want to improve my workflow, especially with pixel art. It takes me 3 hours to do what takes most people 30 minutes to do ten times as well, and I feel like the first step to bridging the gap is to understand how to naturally get depth and detail while not thinking about it too much, I want to be speedy but I don't want to be slapdash, basically, so if you guys have any tricks of the trade to maximize output in minimal time, I would be grateful to hear them... So with that, I'll stop blabbering and upload these guys already!

TL;DR - I made some space monkey sprites in 24 hours, and they stink even though I spent a lot of time on them; can you help me with some advice on improving general quality as well as workflow?

Space Monkey Agent Paulskevic


Evil Space Gorilla


Evil Helicopter Chimp


I apologize in advance for the shameful lack of quality, I hope you can believe me when I say I'm trying as best as I can (in this case within the limits of 24 hours, otherwise I would've spent even more time on each individual character). Please though, fire away, I only want to get better, and any advice you can give I'll try to keep in mind in the future when working on pixel art. Thanks everybody!



P.S. There is one last thing I'm curious about, just for the sake of extra knowledge; during our game jam, there were two main issues regarding implementing the character art. First off was that due to the dimensions of the rooms, we had to stretch out my pixel art considerably so it would relatively fit the sizes of the levels, which were of a pretty significantly large resolution. Obviously that made the sprites look really blown up and sloppy, but what I'm curious about for any programmers or otherwise knowledgeable fellows around here is what the solution to that problem would be? I'm sure there's some sort of compromise, be it a camera fixed on the player or something to that effect, I'd be interested to hear it.