It's tough to show gender in small sprites like these, but if you really want him to look like a guy, it's best to do so through clues in his costume. The entire sprite looks pretty muddy and blurred, you could really benefit from reducing the number of colors, adding more contrast and more saturation. Don't be afraid of making bold changes, making outlines clear and showing where elements separate is the key to readability!

Look up "hue shifting" on wikipedia to see how your color choice could improve.

Wonderful! I love the mood you've created. However, I was confused at first because I thought that the dark objects were paperthin walls with no depth. It took me a while to realize they were "cliffs". Easy way to solve this: get rid of the dark outline on the top of the cliff, that's what created the illusion that it was an object in itself. It also reduces the noise within the piece - you don't necessarily want dark outlines around everything, only the important stuff.

Surprised no one's commented on this yet, it definitely deserves some attention! I love your character, he does indeed look bold and bouncy I'd consider increasing the contrast on him though, since he is the main character and he needs to stand out. At the moment, the most visible feature of the scene is the tree, which although beautiful (love the colors!) doesn't need to be that prominent.

Have you considered creating a background, to show depth, like mountains and such? The horizon here should be at eye level yet you don't have one, that's probably one of the factors making the scene look "fake". I agree with the grass, you could probably decrease the saturation on the earth. The grass seems too flat as well, it just looks like a green surface of whatever. Making individual blades and clumps of leaf-like shapes will convey the impression that it is grass as opposed to random green mush.

The hue shifting on the tree looks great, but it doesn't really translate anywhere else in the scene except the earth, which makes it look quite out of place. These kind of colors require very very specific conditions, and a bright sunny day is not one of these! Think more about how all the elements are interconnected: how would light act on such a day? is it worth making things look "cool" at the expense of realism? I like where this is headed though, I look forward to seeing more!

Excellent advice Mathias, thank you very much. I've tried to apply most of what you said. One of the issues I'm working on at the moment is that the level buttons don't look "button"-ey enough. I've moved the backgrounds around so they're less noisy. I don't really want to add the orange borders again, it makes them look messy again.. also, without borders the black areas for the names of the levels form a thick black line and there's no way to contain the viewer's eye.



Edit: here's a video demo of the way the interface will work. http://video.gammosaur.com/NewLevelSelection.mov

@Coffee: Thanks for the kind words! I'm also quite glad with how the font and interface turned out. Sorry for not clarifying, the window of in which you see the ship in the shopping menu will simply be an animated demonstration of the upgrade - no gameplay here. The interface shows up between levels so you can upgrade your ship. When you're actually playing the game, it's full screen

We don't have any plans to release it for Android yet as we're just focused on getting the iPhone version out for the moment.

Cheers!

Edit: one more update tonight, I'm working on the online level browser.