This is one of only a few things I've ever done involving tiles so far as a pixel artist. Any feedback on it would be appreciated, as I'm just trying to get this right as I go based on memory of threads I've read here and what silly amounts of common sense I came built with.

I'm making tiles and characters for a platforming game much akin to the Canabalt or Robot Unicorn style of play, just with extra elements thrown into the mix. Characters and other assets I'm good with (ignore the character in there, he'll be changing to something more fun looking, just kept it in there for size comparison). The thing I'm not so well-practiced with is tilesets. I've very roughly sketched out what one environment I would like to base a level on below:



And after a few hours of fiddling around, here is what I've ended up with so far, without any backdrop, foreground, paralax fun stuff, etc. thrown in.



Aaaaand it's 55 tiles so far. A good chunk of which are just mirrored versions of existing tiles. The 'windows' will be getting an overhaul, and those slat thingies in the middle of the stone platform with the two windows on either side of them were just to see what else could be done with those temporary window borders to make more use out of what was already created.



Not asking for anyone to redo a whole tileset to better handle the sketch I made or anything like that.  But just any crits on how I'm going about my tilemaking that could be executed more successfully would be very helpful to me. Always learning. Thanks!

I'm surprised I've not seen anyone on here praising this game.  You make every sprite, background, element of music, and do all the coding to make microgames and comics.  The interface takes right from the pages of Mario Paint, even keeping icons and layout consistent, and has animation/onion skinning capabilities.

I don't have a camera on me or I'd take some pictures of the interface that I figure would do it more justice than the ones I could find.  The color palette is limited, but that's half the fun.


(this is during one of the built-in tutorials)

I'm no professional pixel artist or game developer, but this title has surely gotten me excited and confident in my abilities for advancing beyond their comprehensive engine (even if it is nothing more than a toy with open source components that lets you take it apart and build new toys from ) and having a better grasp on the logic of coding.

Demo video of Matt Bozon of Wayforward (Shantae's Revenge, etc) making a Shantae microgame (4 mins 34 secs):
LINK

I've already made like 3 games that would make Gallagher proud with exploding watermelon sprites.

Hello again, comrades!  I want to progress with this piece further, but want to refine what I'm doing currently before moving further into doing a background so as to avoid a bunch of re-working.  Here it is thus far:



Color count to this point is 15.  My personal goal is to keep it at 16 or below, as palettes are something I am still very inept at planning efficiently, so lat leaves me with one hue to work with and an entire background to develop (my other weakness - backgrounds have always been the part that kills the final product of my images when I decide to add them.)

Do I have enough of a palette diversity to support a good scene composition in space with my bright and dark hues? Are my ramps too similar?

So that is where I stand as of now!  I would love any opinions, critiques on any rendering or perspective issues etc, palette tweak suggestions, or even ideas anyone might have.  I would love to have a nice space scene to place this in so I will be doing some reference research later probably about how I'll go about that.  I'm thinking a distant planet or moon off in the distant reaches, maybe some meteors, stars spattered about, and considering whether anything will be chasing the character.

This is mostly a personal project with no intention other than broadening my understanding of the medium.  It is based on a haphazard home movie we shot of our 1 year-old daughter dressed up in goofy clothing and tin-foil covered baby toys traveling through space that I'm still editing in my free time to become a mock movie trailer for fun.  This will probably end up being the accompanying mock video game title screen screenshot this will be spoofed into.

That being in mind, there is no planned direction for this in terms of the story the rest of the pictures elements will tell so the possibilities are endless.  Any feedback is openly embraced.  I really respect the skill of this community.

I'm on my lunch break and don't have access to my pixel software of choice, so I'll post up a WIP animation of this later from home.

Updated at long last after what I did not reallize was over a year after this thread's creation.. Sorry for the zombie revival

This is was originally intended for the previous weekly challenge (Circled) at PixelJoint but I did not have any time to work on it after starting it early that week.  Though I won't be able to enter it as a challenge entry anymore, I still wanted to finish it!

Stages:



<-----NEWEST

Circle canvas was removed.  No real need for it since this isn't a restriction I need the piece to adhere to anymore.



I know there is much left to do, and I'm liking the progress.  Just getting a little intimidated as I move toward being almost ready for the fine-touch rendering.  The shading of the curvature of the bowl is my biggest worry.  Will be working on this when I find time throughout the week, but will be checking the boards to see if any critique is offered (and it would be very appreciated if it was!).

Greetings!  I am a long-time lurker of Pixelation but this will be my first post.  Did not want to make any posts before I had some real work to put up, of which this is my very first item I really put effort and time into!  I always try to dive straight in when learning things so I went ahead and made my first project an animation as well.  I aspire to eventually make an adventure game in the style of the Sierra classics such as Leisure Suit Larry or Space Quest, and this character is likely going to be worked in as the main character of it.  When time to do that comes, the dark outlines will probably be removed and character model simplified a bit to make animating and presence against the background more fluid, but that bridge will be crossed much later.

For now I am simply interested in growing as a pixel artist, and feedback from the members of this outstanding community would be something I consider invaluable criticism!




Some things I know need worked on:

• The palette is something I am sure could be changed for the better, but what direction I want it to go in is something I find myself unsure of.
• When the bone gets put back into the jacket, it's just the frames that led up to it playing in reverse.  I might try to at least change a few frames of unique  positions that have him slide the bone back into the jacket instead of the blurred ZOOM frame shoving it back in the same way it came out.  But it flows better than I thought it would when I put it all together, so I thought some criticism may open me up to options I hadn't considered before tweeking.
  
• Work on the shading of the character.  Since I didn't get very into the specific details until after I had drawn all the frames of this, I got a bit overwhelmed by trying to go back and try, and didn't want to overdo it when I'm so inexperienced with methods of AA and dithering - feared I'd hurt the presentation more than help it.
• Smoke rising from the cigar - I planned originally to have smoke waving above the cigar continuously but I'm a little out of my element working with GraphicsGale.  Having been almost exclusively a flash artist when it came to animated graphics, I couldn't find a simple way to have the smoke loop smoothly after defining frame delays.  I didn't have the patient persistence in me to add 40 frames (or however many more it would take) to keep the motion timing that exists already while having consistent timing for changes in the smoke direction.

Thank you in advance to anyone that replies, I had a great time making it!

Edit: My fiancee said "I hope they don't think it's too Sam & Max-y for 'em." "Whatya mean?" "Cus it's a dog in a trench coat."  Had never played the game and never knew about that.  I assure you I did not have the game in mind when I made this 

Also, here's the individual frames.  I tried pretty hard to make the blurred arm frame not look like an MS Paint picture some kid took the spray can tool and went to town on.