Welp this one's ambitious isn't it.

I can't fathom why this needs to be so huge. Just the size alone will force you to compromise drastically on quality, otherwise you're going to log so many hours in this piece you WILL hate it before you finish it.
In cases like this I find it helpful to ask - Are you SURE you want to use a low color pixel art style for this? Why not full color?


some thoughts that come to mind -
What is the goal here for this image? What is to be used for? What is it trying to do? What's the mood? What's the story?
Looking at your WIP image, I don't really get it. I'm not sure what I'm looking at.

And there's a lot to look at . . . but at the same time there's nothing to look at.
Where do you want to me look? Will you be adding some sort of focal point?

-Why do the trees get bigger as they get further away from the viewpoint? Most perspective cues are way off.
-Sky and ground clash terribly - while the sky is trying to be surreal and whacky, the ground is very mundane, lacking any of the surreal oddness seen in the sky. It's easy to believe that the sky layer was copied from something entirely different and pasted behind the green ground layer. Only bit of continuity I can find are the 5-pointed stars stamped here and there.
-If clouds get dither, other things should too. Dither consistently as you render surfaces.


I ADMIRE the effort and the ambition. If/when you start to feel like you're in over your head, don't be afraid to dial this back a bunch, or take what you learned and start a new one.

Nice! Got a working build going. Looks cool so far.
You're not asking for this, but here's a little platformer player characters controls info I recently found and thought was very insightful.


I like eishiya's point on the light aura parented to the player character. Not only does it look inconsistent with the other light auras in the game (it's also rather distracting - why is there a tiny yellow glow emitted from the player?), but I wonder if you might just handle it completely differently - instead of trying to lighten the area around the character, try a vignette to darken the edges of the screen. Would make sense in a night scene and I think it implies the player has a finite viewing distance, especially in Vagante's extreme vignette implementation:


I bet you've played Terraria. More good lighting examples.


Oh man . . . 480x256 is a scary size for a singular piece of pixel art. You may have done some bg tiles that span that size, but have you done any single cohesive scenes at this size? It'll be a project.
Maybe 240x128 instead? Which is double your game's res instead of only a quarter of like your original title screen version. Yeah . . . 480 is massive. Find a way to simplify the task.

As for the character proportions issue, that's an interesting one. I don't see any problem with a larger rendered version of the protagonist having different proportions on the title screen if resolution allows. Very common in games.

I'm reminded of Cave Story+ and how it handled doubling pixel resolution for its sprites.


Personally, I vote for a more realistic looking figure for the title screen. It lets the player know what the character really looks in true form. If you have any portrait art in the game using large enough sprites, it would likely use these same realistic proportions as well.

You're the art dude for this one - make a call, commit to it, and keep going.

480x256? I think you might be after 480x270. A lot of modern pixel games run at 480x270, including Enter the Gungeon and Hyperlight Drifter. Maybe you're not accounting for HUD in those dims.

I would settle on a pixel size for all graphics and just stick to it.
The menu being significantly lower res than the rest of the game seems strange. If filling a large 480px wide screen with a nice title screen graphic seems too challenging, try coming up with a simpler concept.

Makin' a game, eh. Aight aight. Lemme see.

I did think the cars were spiders at first. Because of the spiderwebs mainly, I guess. And the outdoors environment.
Then I read "Tiny Taxis". At a glance, in the context of the mockup that blue car does resemble a fat little spider with red eyes, imo.

What does the yellow bar top middle do?

So the game is a competition where each player maneuvers their car to the tiny white guys, and transports them somewhere?
Fuel is finite so they need to hurry and/or refuel when need be.
I'm guessing the opening in left and right do the Pacman thing - let player quickly warp to either side.
Can't really tell what the red platforms are, with the little white dude on them. They remind me of trampolines.

Background seems random. Will it change per level skin?
Is that a moon or a sun? I'm not sure why it would be colored so darkly, being that it's a light source.
Think about designing some interesting set pieces to place behind the platforms, between the foreground and distant horizon line background - some big trees or thickets or something.

I'm guessing your tiled platforms are supposed to be treebark? It's hard to tell what that noisy texture is supposed to be exactly.

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I think you have a serious visual priority/focal problem - my eyes go to the HUD much than the game area. The details, the colors, the text. That's where my eyes go. The fuel gauges most of all.

The fuel gauges in the HUD are a brave choice. To help them work better, I suggest giving them more space and revising them to have perfect semi circles. They look compromised, as if you ran out of vertical space in your layout, said "screw it", and arbitrarily squished them vertically to make them fit.
Move "P1" to the left, or top middle, of its respective color-coded HUD region.
I assume the fuel gauges are highly important, hence their level of contrast and the space they take up. Do they need the 'E', the 'F', and the fuel symbol? Do they need all the meter marks? You sure this isn't noise overkill? They're so busy. Players just need to know how much fuel they currently have. The fuel gauge needle simply gets lost in all that detail. I think significant revision is in order.

Have you tried digging up any vehicle dashboard reference for the HUD design? Might give you some better dashboard-ish ideas as to how you might convey information each player needs.

Green thingie is usually called an "awning" I believe.

Went for an edit. I think I was just trying to help details read better.
Simplified some things here and there. etc
Palette adjustments, and added a quick background so the building's lighting would have context.
Tried not to add colors but ended up adding a few I think.



(unfortunately while doing the edit, your cat jumped down and got hit by a car. dw, he felt no pain - it was an eighteen wheeler)