Placeholder for my response and possible edit from my part on Monday since I'm outside my place and I absolutely love doing characters

Here I am and what's promised is debt!

From what I see one of your main concerns is the sheer amount of work involved on animating 30~ sprites, I gotchu there brother, just place the lightsource directly above characters, this will allow you to flip one frame of the walking frame, reducing the amount needed from 3 to 2, what's even better in this case is that you can flip the two frames you need for a walking animation with this technique, making the walk cycle 4 frames instead of 3, which may be perceived as a more fluid animation with the same amount of work! (The idea here is to draw the passing and the contact frames of the walk cycles)

But what happens to the extra missing frame? Should all be savings in efforts? Well, no. A good idea is repurpose that frame to give a standing position to your goblin, you can convey a lot of personality in a single frame so the idea is to use it as best as possible to communicate who your character is.

I did a redraw to the character trying to give it a little more personality and also making it resemble more the idea I have of a goblin in mind, and of course, with the lightsource directly above for the reasons I previously mentioned. (The idea I had in mind is a goblin trying to escape from a dungeon, playing as the bad guy to justify attacking his monster friends, kinda dumb, I know)

Other small detail that really adds up is to avoid the outline where the character feet meet the floor, this makes it feel grounded, also add a shadow.

Hope this helps a bit!

There's a lot more to address but I think is better if we help you with this one step at a time.

Here's a really quick sketch of what I would have in mind when spriting a tree along some notes:

- Use reference
- Always establish a clear direction of the lightsource.
- Avoid outlining inside the sprite.
- Group shapes, you don't want to draw every single leaf, just draw some big shapes that resemble a cluster of leafs.
- Add some variation to the tree trunk by adding more interest to it, a little texture, some branches, some roots, a hole, etc.
- Maybe it's better to add a small patch of grass on the bottom of the tree to ground it a bit, interactions between stuff is a strong point to sell believability.

(By the way, this forum has a built in zoom function, so always post your sprites at 100%, if you need to zoom some image just click on it)



You can also check some tutorials by Saint11 ( https://saint11.org/blog/pixel-art-tutorials/ ) that are great for beginners, here's one on trees:

Ohhhhh, I thought that was some kind of poisonous fog! But now that you mention those are clouds I even see a zeppelin that I missed before!

- You are 100% right about that far highlights, there's no way they could exist, my bad.

- You did a great job with the clouds that I misread as dense, poisonous clouds, thing is, I do suck doing clouds, that's why they look like mountains 

- I think your character looks great with the details, to be honest the main and maybe only reason why I took so many details out of your character is because I suck at drawing folds and drapery. Merging shapes is just a resource that I find interesting because it makes the spectator complete shapes in it's head and as a bonus it's a good justification for my laziness.

- Disclaimer, this is a non paid promotion and no one is pointing a gun at my head I swear, anyway, I would highly recommend aseprite for pixelart, is cheap, is great, has animation features and looks like a software made for a 3 year old (So everything is easy to learn)

- Keep the great work and hopefully lets keep this forum alive.

The style is perfect, I think the animation is on point too, loved the one of the little guy shooting with a gun on each hand.

I think the saturation and values of the palette can be improved, specially the values, we as humans crave contrast for a reason beyond my understanding.

The other thing that can be improved are the tilesets, they lack the definition of the character and some shadows are so shallow that ended up looking like an outline. Maybe referencing some artist that are good at environment could help.

I hope this helps somehow, sadly I'm not great at explaining 

[Updated 2021/03/23][YYYY/MM/DD]