I'd personally stay away from stylized dithering, and minimize its use as much as possible. It usually ends up looking kind of noisy and rough, when Darkstalkers portraits are usually very smooth and even in texture - Employing regular dithering only very lightly.

..That has nothing to do with fortresses or crafts. This is (ostensibly) going to be part of a Zelda style action/adventure game that just happens to feature a young miner as a protagonist. Predictably, it begins in a mine.

It's tiled as it is due to a limitation in the game system, so there's a lot of redundancy. The mirrored stuff is raw laziness, and because this is one of many backgrounds i'll be working on, any non-mirrored walls and details will have to be more afterthought. If myself and the guy I'm working with can muster it, this is going to end up being a pretty huge project. Well, huge for two guys, at least.

I'm going for a decidedly Genesis-y feel, and as such have ripped nearly all of the colors used from various genesis games. Also, this being one of my few forays into environment rendering, I'm looking for ways I can improve the visibility/readability. As it stands, the character gets lost in all the detail. It won't be played isometrically, the isometric tiles are there to give better flexibility to the level layouts.



and the character


Obviously any crits regarding him are also welcome.

I don't think he's defending it so much as pointing out that it doesn't really matter.

Low quality? Are you being deliberately patronizing?  

First and foremost.
http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/index.php?topic=3467.0

Keep in mind that pixeling isn't just a matter of limitation, for a lot of folks it's a preferred medium, just as a person might prefer acryllic oer water color, pen over pencil. Fundamentals play a big factor too, anatomy, lighting, color choice are just as important in pixel art as they are in any other medium.

Let's start with the second picture. There are more colors than I can count by hand - Graphics gtale counts 1677 unique colors, which suggest that the gradients were automatically generated. This is not pixel art. It's not that one needs to place every single bit by hand, but not only could you probably get away with using less than a tenth of that, but having the compuer automatically light something for you goes against the basic definition. Take for example, my avatar uses 31, and that's still a bit much for my liking. The .gif format only supports a palette of 255 unique colors, just to give a bit more comparison.

Same goes for the background of the first picture, but you've got the right -idea- with the figures there. apply that same principle to your backgrounds. Now, as for the figures themselves, scan the above link for some anatomy tutorials. The information contained therein can provide *much* more information than I could ever hope to.

Lighting seems to be an issue -  try to keep in mind where your light is coming from and the volumes of the objects it would be hitting.

It's looking pretty nice so far.
The biggest problem I'm seeing here is that it isn't anatomically correct.
I don't know if you have used any references. If you didn't: You should.
Here's a few pictures you could use:
http://vote29.com/myblog/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/human_male_skull.jpg
http://www.daviddarling.info/images/human_skull_side.jpg

Another problem is that you're not using enough colours to really define the forms in the skull.
It appears rather flat now because you simply haven't added enough contrast. I used 2 more shades in this edit to demonstrate what I mean:

[I also played with the lighting from the eyes a bit, hehe]

I think I fixed most annatomical issues here, and fixed the volume problems you had going on.

Yeah, I have been using references, I'm still working at *interpreting* them correctly, however.

Just to show the progress report:



-Current. Attempt at addressing anatomy issues, and flatness...
And the teefs.
I'm not sure which one looks better, this or the last one
Morez.