its like the background for a platform thing. i guess the design is even more confusing as I have moved it around to tile together the ends, so the center now was the 4 corners in the original image. I'll upload a tiled version, though i must admit that now that you mention it, the random depth does look truly riddiculous. Oh well, what you get for staring yourself blind on a picture.

nice colour edit zeid. I agree and think yours is way better, but perhaps taken a little bit to far for my own taste.
Pypebros: in most day scenes from platformers the foreground is actually darker while the background is more washed out and lighter/tinted to blue. One time that you will want the foreground to be lighter than the bg is if you're making a night area.
Basically what trevious said is the truth and science, and what i say is a common way to simplify this and make it even more readable in platformers. generally you would want your foreground to have an as normal as possible range of colours. then the background beeing either greyed and lightened, greyed and tinted to a colour or grayed and darkened.

The castle is awesum shit, just make the blocks that stick up on top that is facing us a little "thicker". i know that this kind of angle is kinda hard but right now they look paper thin. also the shade of grey used to outline the bricks in front should perhaps be a bit darker so that the texture is similary strong in the shadows as in the light. but that might just be my monitor.

beetle is kinda flat. i guess the white dittering is meant to be a highlight to show form but it doesnt read well. Also the collors are standard mspaint which generally is a bad thing. I'm not good at animation so no comments on the third.
gj and welcome

Your shading and texture in the second image is ok. but the windows need shading to show form. Also i think the building will look better with a reddish dark color. Heres an edit showing what i mean.

Your first image looks kind of strange. Is he like walking against us? his shirt hanging out on one side is really hard to make readable on a 32*32sprite, same is a mutilated arm. you need to do it simple. if he has a mutilated arm you give him a stereotypical hook or something. Or you make one arm way shorter than the other. Also diss the chesthair. wont be readable in such a small sprite. The angle is also kind of screwed. His head is seen directly ahead but his feet seem to be seen from a 45 degree angle above. I don't think I'll edit this as it would have been very little left of the original image if i did. Just try to get it somewhat symmetrical and then pick a light source and shade it. Good luck

You've got to ditch those eyes if you want it to look more like a human. I made an edit, but don't really have much to add from what others have said.