This is an ending screen for a flash game I'm making.



This displays after the player breaks away from Earth's gravity and launches into space. The yellow speck will flicker and slowly move away from the planet, while congratulatory text is displayed on the top.

To be honest it looks a little bit better than I thought I was capable of at first, but I still don't think it looks like it was drawn by a true professional. Anybody have advice? In particular, I feel like the earth looks a bit too "blobby", but I'm having trouble adding detail to it that doesn't seem like random noise. Also, I feel like the space area could be done with more detail to seem more mysterious and fantastic.

Now that I'm typing it out, it occurs to me that my main problem with most of my art in general is that I don't know how to add detail that is believable and professional looking. I just draw in "blobs" and tend to leave it that way. Any help with this is appreciated. Thanks guys!

Honestly, I've played plenty of little games which managed to keep me immersed with this type of minimalist artstyle. If your goal is to make a small game, then I would just go ahead and do it, despite your tiles not looking anything like Decroded's edit. You'll be happier with a completed game on your resume even if it has super-simple graphics. I know it sounds like I'm telling you to be complacent, but I'm kind of getting the impression that you got intimidated by Decroded's cool looking edit and gave up. My suggestion is to take that grass tile, add another complementary tile (maybe some blocks or stones) and show us a mockup of a hypothetical game. The key to making good, but very simple pixel art is how it all ties together, which is why mockups are more telling than individual tiles. Here's hoping you didn't give up!

Hahah, that's very cool. It's like a fighting game stripped all the way down to the very core. The funny thing about fighting game players is that they could even make this simple game into an intense rock-paper-scissors-esque mental showdown.

As for the pixel art, it could use more detail obviously. All of the colors seem rather dark, except for the swords and the helmet props which have blazing contrast against the rest of the scene.

Not really much else to say for critique. I thought this was really cool.

It's good that you're motivated enough to tackle all these projects. However, before you work on a fighting game in particular, your "big" pixel art skills are going to need some work. There are a couple of major problems hindering these piece, and thankfully, they're both pretty simple to fix.

The first problem is the pose. You were right to feel odd about the arms and the legs. His body parts aren't working in unison to do anything meaningful. What's the purpose of the sprite? Is it going to be a walking animation, or an idle animation? His pose makes him look like his knees are pressed together with his lower legs splayed outward, butt sticking out. I'm also not quite sure why one of his arms is raised. I would suggest redoing the piece with a solid pose in mind; maybe use a mirror to come up with something. If you do that, then suddenly things will begin to make more sense and he won't look "odd" anymore.

The second problem is your chaotic pixel placement. It looks like you tried to imitate jpeg artifacts by hand. On small pieces like this (even though it may be bigger than your regular work), it's still important not to overcomplicate things. Here is an edit I made to illustrate:



It's good to illustrate texture, but you need to be subtle because you don't have very much room to do so in pixel art. If you go overboard it just looks like a murky swamp of random pixels. For now I think you'd be better off just picking a light source and shading from the opposite direction.

I hope this was helpful. Good luck with your games!