Hey guys! Starting up my little platformer (again, for real this time, definitely.), and I made a quick mockup of it yesterday, along with getting basic controls and collision detection and such down. Did the walking and jumping animations too, and will probably post them later. Anyway, here's the cave.

Sorry it's at 3x. I blew it up before saving, so I lost the original mockup. (I still have most of the pieces, though.)

Looking for critique on the robot's design and the cave floor, mostly, along with any general thoughts you might have.
The main thing I'm thinking of is what I'm going to do with the robot. I kind of want him facing forward all the time, because I think people are going to have a hard time bonding with a little robot unless they're staring into his (her?) big robot eye (into his/her robot soul). The problem I'm having now is that I want the player to be able to shoot in any direction at any time, but sticking a turret onto the robot that spins all the way around its body makes no sense, and would look pretty weird, I think. The solution I thought up was "ah, robo-mind bullets!"

So, I don't know. I'll be working on more tiles for now. Any thoughts in the meantime would be great.

Oh, and is there any easy and quick way to turn my robot's walking and jumping animations into gifs for you guys? (On top of the cave background, I mean, not just in a white void as they are now.) If not, I'll just fraps some gameplay later tonight.

So, yeah. Haven't worked on these in awhile, but I figured I should start again. Started making two new enemies, the fox-face, and the mole thing. The problem that I'm having with them, and to a lesser extent, the rest of my artwork, is that none of them look very...pixel-arty. They look more like random MS-Paint drawings to me, and a lot of them don't really seem to go well together, like they're ripped from different games or something:

...the mole guy isn't finished, which partly explains his MS-Paint look, but I cleaned him up as best I could, and he still looks terrible. The fox is "done," meaning I've cleaned him up as well as I know how, and he still doesn't seem to fit in, nor does he look very pixel-artish. The stone sprite, and the mud surrounding the water also look too plain to be considered pixel art to me, but I have no idea how to add detail to them. Tried adding moss and stuff to the rock for texture, but it all looked awful.
Basically, I'm looking for advice on how to make my sprites and tiles match each other better. Right now, they all look like they're from different sources to me. = \
Also looking for advice on how to make the mole and fox better. They both look pretty bad to me right now.

Also, did an animation of the chicken jumping, and starting working on the fox's snake-crawling animation. Is there any way to slow down .gif files? Right now, they're both way too fast. (Using Graphics Gale right now!)

Thanks!

Edit: Thought one of the main reasons my art might look bad is because I'm drawing everything too large...tried doing a lower-res version of the fox, and came up with this:
He seems really choppy to me now, though. Any obvious flaws?
Edit 2: Removed some...don't know what it's called...banding, staircasing, in the tail. Actually, I think I replaced the banding with staircasing, hahah. I don't know what to do with his forehead, though. Looks a little weird to me with that straight 45 degree angle, but if I try making it rounder when he's that small, it gets really jaggy looking. = \

Edit 3: Tried to make his face and tail rounder and less choppy looking with some internal AA:
Edit 4: Added colored outlines...

...And that's all I can do to clean him up.
So what do you guys think? Are my original sprites too big? How can I make this fox better? Why is my mole so awful looking?
My whole day is free tomorrow, so I'm looking forward to working on these sprites all day long. Please help, so I'm not just digging myself further into a bad pixel art hole for eight hours tomorrow!

First of all, hello to everyone here. I've been lurking here for awhile, but this is my first time posting. I'm looking forward to getting to know all of you. =)
I've been an artist for awhile (I guess I'm decent, definitely not great), but I just started pixeling a few days ago. I'm pretty bad at it. It's surprisingly difficult trying to cram so much info into so little space, and I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it. There are some incredible artists here, so hopefully you guys can point me in the right direction.

I want to make a modest little platforming game, and I just started my first tileset. Even though they don't look it, they're probably around five hours of work all together. Like I said, I'm having some trouble figuring this stuff out, hahah. Here they are!

First cave mockup...just some floor tiles and some quick background tiles, really.


After crawling around in tunnels for a bit, I want to have the game open up into a giant cavern, to change the scenery for the player. The waterfall is supposed to be *far* away, even though it's impossible to tell from the picture. I'm hoping when it's animated it'll be more obvious; the water is going to fall very slowly, and I might use some parallax magicks for the lake the falls are falling into.


First one again, but with higher contrast on everything. Everything looked a little too gray to me. At first, I was thinking I'd have basically everything in the game be tinted blue, like the only source of light in the game was the ambient light from the blue rock walls, but I think that'd get boring to look at very quickly, so I think I'm just going to light everything with natural white light.

So...any help or advice would be very much appreciated. I don't think the tiles look bad right now, but I don't think they look especially interesting, either. Any sort of help at all would be great, since I'm pretty much brand new to pixeling. Any sort of good cave/waterfall pixel art would be great too...I have no idea how I'm going to draw the cavern the waterfall is in right now...I'm imagining the cave walls getting lighter and lighter as they fade back into the distance to where the waterfall is, but I have no idea how I'm actually going to render that, and I can't find much reference for what I want to draw anywhere, since there aren't many super-giant caverns with huge waterfalls in the middle of them in real life, hahah.

I do have a few sprites done, too; the player's walk cycle, and a monster (slug thing) walk cycle, but I can't save them as gifs for the moment, so they'll have to wait...actually, on that subject, any recommendations for good pixellng programs would be appreciated, too. I'm using Graphics Gale right now, which I mostly love, but it doesn't have a HSB color picker, and I'm horrible at working in HSL.

Thanks again for anything you can offer me, guys. I'll be plugging away in the meantime! o/