This is just a really quick fly by on your metallic/plated armor sprite. i didnt really want to take a ton of time to redefine andfill in areas of either proportions or anatomy that i might have wanted to fix (im very tempted to pull that left elbow away from the torso so that its not hidden behind his torso and shorten the other arm's forearm right off the bat). This was merely a quick exercise on how to go about possibly achieving a more metallic look

its something that requires a bit of practice, but just note that metal when its not reflecting some specular or highly reflective light at a certain angle isnt as 'light' in value as one might think. This way you are able to reserve a nice wide range of lighter values to define areas that catch 'a bit more light' with values that are 'slightly lighter' than your base range of medium values, or you can really make something pop with a very focused, near white pixel for more intense specular effects.

also focus on shapes first. if somethings round, worry about shading it to be round first, and then modify the shape to account for its metallic finish, not the other way around.

I really like what youve made its got a lot of charm to it, but i wanted to hop in to say that i think your saturation is really top heavy in your current mockup, and perhaps toning down some of those sky sat values can help balance out your screen presentation some.

If you truly wanted to make a game from this, your biggest hurdle right off the bat would be to get your user to have their eyes actually focus on the character, vs the sky. backgrounds need to be pretty, but secondary, and by throwing in an entire atmosphere of full on saturation is not helping the cause. your sprites excellent character is being totally drowned out (the one standing on the rooftop).

i say tone down your sky values, tone down the saturation in the secondary layer between the sky and fore layers (not quite as much as the sky layer) and definitely tone down some of your oranges on the roof/panelling on the houses, and i think youll find that your very nice wall and platform tiles will stand out more.

I whole heartedly agree with mathias.

whats the motivation for even wanting to pixel this piece? Are you aiming for some sort of practice for how detailed your pixel art can look with a photorealistic approach? If you plan to try to emulate the smoothing gradations of every pixel into the next, youre going to find out very quick that it takes an enormous amount of time to manually account for that and to be satisfied with all of your pixel placement, and this problem only becomes geometrically larger with canvas size. Hell, ask Elk - his rather stunning (jaw dropping, etc) pixel dragon masterpiece took him several hundreds of man hours to produce. The end result is gorgeous but i dont know how many people truly appreciate all of the manual effort taken to produce it.

If you want to recreate the image id imagine your best use of your time is to attempt to paint it. or perhaps draw it with a pencil. This way youll get all the benefit of practicing the skill and learning from the piece rather than trying to wrestle with the art of pixel placement ontop of it all.

Sometimes i feel that a lof of us as pixel artists tend to hide behind the art itself to either willfully ignore or perhaps cover up our lack of knowledge on a subject. i should know something about this, as ive suffered from that habit for a very long time.

I remember a time period earlier in the year where there was a whole string of threads of people posting about help with trees. looking through the thread history might reveal some interesting topics for your perusal.

http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/index.php?topic=10520.msg112358#msg112358 here was an example i had made near that same time frame with some step by step progress shots. dont forget to read helm school me on proper modern pixel techniques as theyre quite useful keeping your shading look clean and not blurry or blendy.