I hope so, but really it's up to you to read up and apply that stuff to everything else. All the little things; mushrooms, building etc. should conform to the same viewpoint as the landmass (atm they're pretty much in profile). Can you sketch guidelines for them?

Try keeping guides on a layer on top of the final with opacity or multiply blending so you stay consistent.

To match my guides you'd have to broaden the central ellipse a bit (as though looking from further above):

I really agree on the simplification though: such focus on detail in a lo-res cartoon? I think it's looking a bit stiff and my solution would be smoothing out anatomical & rendering stuff in favour of nice shapes. 

More like this? (on pistachio's) Thought expression could be more 'check out the size of my scissors' than 'rather annoyed by this outfit'.

@wolfenoctis

Thanks, It seems like she's some sort of superpowered teen ninja though, the bow-legged thing is counter to what I was trying to do with the strong straights.

Hey!

Gonna echo Larwick here; you've got the sharp angles but it looks opaque; the subdivisions you've made of the original surface are self-contained ie. not across multiple faces as you'd expect looking through it, also no ship!(would be broken up a bit, hall of mirrors style), The background colour would make a big difference too; hopefully the game is all inky black space, 'cos that would be great; diamonds are traditionally displayed on black velvet for contrast, you could really do with more darks to push the lights more I think, more extreme the contrast the better!

If you were to block out the far side of the crystal + the whole of the ship, then apply the frontal faces at opacity, could look well, might help with staying purposeful, keeping track of so many bits anyway, even if it does sound rather laborious. The previous aside it'll definitely be fairly easy to lose a larger impression of the lightsource with so many planes & reflections, so tone stuff down when it does inevitably get overcomplicated.

Processed gemstones are cut specifically so that they bounce as much light out the front as possible so they appear to glow; raw, naturally formed stuff obviously won't be quite so dazzling but it's a great 'perfect' material sample to draw on. The other part of that is they also chuck about a bunch of unexpected colours via many small prism effects; splitting light as it travels unevenly, so I'd throw in a few curve balls in the upper register there. Rambling now, I think how refractive the material is due to how much light is slowed down passing through (without being diffused) so in diamond; being super dense, the effect is really pronounced even in tiny stones but perhaps this is a larger factor in huge examples.

     

Riddick?

Deffo

Scribbles:

1. Colour edit: light didn't feel very dramatic, very Riddick, found a nice lighting ref here to pull from

2. Lighting/pose: thought he was kinda doing the running man, could be more menacing, subtle with arms/blades back, turned expendable merc to look at viewer like he's aware of us and maybe he thought he heard something. Lit merc up properly (supposed to be uplighting) so he's less mysterious; you can empathise with him more, and for nice value/colour contrast.

3. Small comp tweaks: put him higher in the frame for a better sense of dominance, culled dead space to the side, now more aligned to thirds. You could experiment more there probably.



Agree on the green shirt, I think orange skin is a lighting thing; it's not very clear where the white light (on Riddick's front) is coming from in the original, I say keep the goggles (nice & distinctive) by lighting up the interior more.