Thank you both for your comments and suggestions.

You have made some valid points and it seems I will need to consider a major rework on the girl's body, since I have a few more issues with her myself ( mainly skirt sharpness ), while trying to retain as much cuteness as I can. As for the faces, my studies mainly involved Castlevania, and the squarish faces but with a more of a jRPG flavor are what I am actually going for  .

For more info concerning artistic direction and narrative of the characters and setting :

Artistic direction

As I said at the start of the thread it's mainly darker backgrounds with brighter foregrounds. Below is one of my visual experiments with the game engine. Please ignore the extremely ugly tiles that seem to pierce the eyes. Don't zoom too much. I am putting the image here to show the general relationship between the values I am going for and the size relationships of the characters with the level. They are one of my quick experiments to get a visual feedback on general colors and not representative of the actual environment I am going for. More about that on the narrative section.



I changed a pixel in the guy's face to change the feel of the hair, changed his skin to a redder shade and made his blue a bit purpler. Changed both their darkest color to dark red.

The reason for those changes is that I am currently aiming for mainly using colder colors for most  of the environment with judicious (hopefully)  use of the warmer ones. So I made both characters closer to red to contrast the environments and differ from them. Maybe I will return the male character's skin to the one before if he is tiring to the eyes.

As for miscellaneous stuff, the Castlevania type GUI is temporary and mainly because I initially made the code for a NES Castlevania type game (minus stairs) so I could have a basis and then evolve it from there according to what I want. The current game's design itself is a child of Castlevania 3. The resolution of the game is 400x240 as shown by the image.

Narrative

The setting is heavily influenced by the "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind" movie's setting concerning the ecosystem, bugs and technological ruins.

Their world is at the end times. It's been years since their sun disappeared ( there is a reason they are still not frozen or devoured by a black hole or something ), while the gate at the end of the world, where the old gods sealed the "demons" from another world, has been breached and an alien ecosystem is constantly spreading from there.

In this world two orphans were living in a village playing and growing up together. One day, in order to save the boy, the girl suddenly grew insect wings. The girl was exiled from the village as an insect "demon" and the boy followed her. Together they made a living in this harsh world by turning to piracy as a duo. Trying to loot a ship that was heading towards the end of the world they found a journal mentioning wonders of the gods and people-like existences with insect wings beyond the gate. Wanting to find both, for different reasons each, they set out towards the end of the world and the truths they would discover beyond the gate.

Hi. My level in pixel art is low so I can not help you with advice, just mostly minor viewer's comments.

The head and t-shirt look very nice. The rest seem to be still in various WIP stages but those that are more worked on seem nice for now to my untrained eye.

As for the issues I think exist:

Right side, fourth finger ( top to bottom ) seems a bit thin and sharp compared to the other fingers.

I can see that the left side is on a rougher stage of WIP, but the pinky seems unnatural. It seems to be sprouting on top of the other finger's starting location. I tried various hand poses, but no matter the perspective, the finger did not look like that, nor could I bend it that way. It might be just my own hand or my lack of strong anatomy knowledge though.

Hope it helped somewhat.

Did some small edits here and there.

Edit : A pixel next to an eye changed to white to show a more uniform pattern.

Thank you everyone for your responses !

After a lot of tinkering with the girl I lean towards number 4 (towards the right) below. The guy is WIP and not shown for now. Depending on the testing with tiles I might have to enclose the sprites in outlines again though. The pirate version idea of @Ambivorous clicked well with me and can easily fit into the setting.



The first is my original, the second is by @loni_art, the third is a combo of the two and the fourth has a more "pirate" flavor.

Below are some other versions of the fourth with minor arm differences.



What are your thoughts ?


@loni_art

The posture is such an improvement and seems smooth and easy to animate, while how to make a version without an outline was a very useful study for me ! I practically made a combo of our versions with a bit of a round fluffy top instead of your shade and little shading in general since I want a brighter feeling. It was too keep the original character feeling and flowery form since it plays a role in the story and character design. I have not mentioned it but she has "fairy" wings.

As for the arms I get what you are saying and it was a headache for me. To preserve the overall flow of the form that I want, I kept them at that length. I have posted some other versions with a bit longer arms but any more than that and it doesn't feel "right" for me. It's a half pixel difference issue for me I guess.

@Vinik

The hair bothers me a bit too. Since I am going for a bit of a pirate theme it might be changed into a hat but I want to retain a bit of that wild/anime hair.

@Ambivorous

Nice ! This actually solves the problem I had about them not looking like a team. The two you made actually look like a team. Also the pose you made is what i will probably keep for the male character since mine indeed had a too neutral one, while the pirate hat actually clicked with me. A pirate theme can easily be incorporated into the story of the game and I think I will go towards that direction. The small edit on the girl is something I also kept in the new versions.