A lot of people ask 'Why?' about the color restrictions, and most of it goes back to carrying on traditions from pixel art's roots on the earliest consoles with extremely limited graphical capabilities. It's generally considered wasteful to use more colors than you absolutely need and using them creatively to stay within a numerical limit can be useful when trying to increase artistic skill within the medium. Conforming to a limited palette encourages hueshifting and requires good knowlege of color theory, so doing so can serve as a test of artistic knowlege.

I personally think you should've had the magic bar's stalagmites as stalactites instead, because though they would logically form under the stalactites of the health bar, they wouldn't form in the other area and moving them closer together might not be a good idea as the player would be confused by bars touching squares at both ends. I'm also wondering, what is the game's general theme? I'm getting a cave vibe from the HUD but not the environment.

Not to be rude, but I think whoever contributed most of the stuff so far needs to refine their skills before moving on to teach others. They're missing several fundamentals of pixel art and iso. Good thing it's wiki.

My resolutions are few:

1. Update my website DAILY, starting now.
2. Pixel more and improve my poor neglected skills.
3. Climb more. You forget how fun it is if you aren't off the ground (excluding jumping) once every few days.
   3a. When that's not an option, get on that chin-up bar in the basement!

I think it's a good idea to start making games as soon as you want to make a game. But What a lot of people new to game design come across is a lack of planning. Even if you think you know exactly how the game should be, open notepad and just make an outline, detailing how stuff should look, how it interacts with the player, and the storyline. Once you do that you can move on to writing the engine in the program of your choice. Game Maker is great to start with because it has a nice programming language that teaches basic programming concepts, but once you want to get into making more serious games, BlitzMAX works a lot better. Unfortunately this is because it's a lower-level language, meaning that it trades ease of creation for game speed and ability to do more with the system.

@sharprm: In Game Maker, platformers are definitely a lot harder than shmups and simple frogger clones, mostly due to the collision detection and everything with gravity. But RPGs are generally even worse, because the player is switching between battle mode and the menu and the overworld and other things, each with its own interface etc. And on top of that there's storyline and cutscenes. How I hate making RPGs.

I think your aa could use some work. The darkest bits are only aaed one pixel, whereas the aa line should go halfway or so to the end of that row/column of pixels. There are some great aa tutorials at http://www.spriteart.com/main.html and http://pixelmonkey.ensellitis.com/tutorials/aa.html .

I think you could make the piece more interesting ny giving the head a different shape, something away from the boring circle you have now. Maybe add some eyestalks?