Thanks for the feedback!   

Isn't a "mugshot" a picture showing exclusively the face? That would be the "mug" part, right? 

Er, oops, I guess I was thinking of a police line-up.  Or something.  Close enough!   

The jump in resolutions may be a conscious decision, but to me it looks jarring as well (as Facet argued)
I'd rather solve the problem some other way... use more colors, bring the room to the characters' resolution, or even bring the characters to the room's resolution.

Personally, I'd just lower the environment's resolution, and if readability issues arise, change the environment to fit to its new res

Yeah you're right, I need to stop cheating like that.  It's tempting for me to break resolution for more detail/smoothness, but it's not worth the inconsistent look.  I could up the resolution of the characters, but that'd be straying too much from the style that I was going for in the first place!

I've lowered the background's resolution, and fiddled with the colors to make it less bland.

thank you for your time but how would i go about smoothing it out?

For example, many times throughout your figures there is a Z-like formation which creates a jagged appearance rather than a round one.  To make it smoother, you have to go back and get rid of the extra pixels that are obscuring the shape you're trying to make.  Here's a really quick example, before and after:



Very incomplete, but hopefully it gets the point across.

This thread is a fantastic read for getting started.  I would specifically look under the section "Jaggies".

Hope that helps!

I'm not at all an expert on animation, but just one thing to point out: I think the animation would benefit a lot from frames at the beginning/end that allow it to slow it down.  If you try to 'pulse' like that in real life, you'll notice you naturally slow down at the beginning and end of your movement; this is because you're pushing with your feet, and allowing gravity to slow your upward movement until you start going down again.  That happens in an arc, not in a linear fashion.

Take a look at fighter sprites and you'll see what I mean.  This isn't the best example, but I'm too lazy to find a better one:


And if you're up to it, I'd recommend animating the feet as well.  They are what is actually driving the upward motion, so it's most natural for them to move first and everything else to follow.

Reaaaally sorry about the long wait!  I loved your edit, Facet, thank you so much.  I wanted to come back with another version that took your edit into account earlier, but I got tangled up in programming for the game and now here I am.

  ---> 

I tried to keep myself from taking too much from your edit, but your earphones were basically perfect so they ended up almost the same.

I mostly realized through your edit that I was taking the concept of outlining far too literally and heavy-handed.  I was also trying to add more detail than is wise at this resolution.  Hopefully I've improved on that.

Animating at twice the size is a strange choice, it seems like a  bit of a messy solution to break the resolution just get a more subtle movement. Going for a 'grooving with the headphones on' idle instead, like Nmb910 mentioned would get my vote too .

Yeah, I think I'm going to scratch the idle animation that I have now.  I definitely plan to have an animation where he puts the headphones on and starts headbanging a little, for when the player leaves him alone for a while.  But for future reference, is breaking resolution universally bad?  For some smaller motions, I can only think of subpixeling as an alternative.

The lighter outline on the girl's hair looks like bad AA, there's no need if it contrasts well without it.

Noted.  I'm also going to see if I can redo her a bit in the same way as the earphone-guy.

(with the proviso that it would be sensible to have a full-size illustration in the intro or titles or wherever, if not a UI portrait; it really isn't a lot of work to do so)

It's impossible to know this since he's the first character I started working on, but the earphone-guy is one character out of ten, and not really central to the plot.  He's not really "deserving" of a UI portrait unless all of the others have them.  And again I feel it would be a bit out of place.

I hate to give a negative example (especially since I also love this game), and perhaps people won't even agree with this, but just to illustrate what I'm trying to say...in my opinion Lone Survivor gives more visual information than it really needs to for the protagonist, and in a way that's kind of out of place.  Especially for a horror game, the players don't really need to know exactly what the main character looks like when the sprite conveys all the important information, and for me the portrait actually was a bit jarring in the horrific atmosphere of the game.  The style is somewhat cartoonish, which doesn't really reinforce everything else going on.  Similarly, the tone of this game will be making some pretty big peaks and valleys, and I don't think I'd be able to do it justice in my character portraits.