Thanks for the suggestion Seiseki. I tried out the bigger rocks, but I didn't seem to think it worked. Maybe I just didn't give it enough love, Konjak seemed to have made it work
(reference)

and





How does the canopy look? I also added texture to the closest set of bushes, but I think it might be too much and it will be difficult to keep track of the character. I implemented the yellow tint, but I miss my old pallet! I'm not sure which one looks better, and I might be bias towards the old one so I can't tell. Thanks for the feedback so far guys!

Hello everyone! I've been reading the threads on getting Pixelation back to the glory days, so I thought I'd help out by being a bit more active. Here's a mockup of a game I'm working on, temporarily named X-Ninja. (X is the only key you use in the game)




As you can see I'm almost done with the background and tiles and all of that, except that pesky foliage on top of the bamboo  is very difficult to pixel. I can't seem to get the middle section of it right.  If anyone has advice or critiques on how to get the foliage to look right, that would be awesome. If you want to make an edit, the tiles are 32x32 and the foliage tiles every 2 32x32 tiles,(so I guess 64x64) If you have any other other critiques, I'd love to hear those as well. 

PS. The background will have parallax scrolling in game so I'm not worried about the alignment of the bamboo thing.

Okay, I went a little nuts with it.



Basically what ninjus said, you have to first define a light source.  In yours, a light source is clear but it is shown by a great big clump of banding. (read up on banding here http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299&PID=139322#139322) Instead, think of the sword as a 3d figure. Where would the light hit the most? Where would the light hardly hit?
Another issue would be the color choice. All of your colors are 100% saturated (or close) which makes the colors seem unrealistic. I like to have my middle colors have the lowest saturation, and as the color gets more extreme in brightness the saturation increases. Some people do it the opposite, its a stylistic choice I think. Also, with you colors you also want to shift the hues as the brightness changes. Usually, when the brightness decreases, the hue shifts towards a blue or purple, and when the brightness increases it shifts to a warmer color like red or yellow. Notice how in my edit the sword is not just red, the darkest is purple and the brightest is orange and pink. Try to incorporate that into your next attempt. Another good resource for general art knowledge is here  http://androidarts.com/art_tut.htm

Good luck!

(changes in sword design were personal choices )

I guess I should start mine huh?

JUST KIDDING almost done! kinda...

I don't have much experience with this type of view, so I can't really help much. What I noticed is that the wheels look a bit too small. I changed some colors around a bit too and added some other small things. Here's my edit

The wheels are a bit lopsided, but I just wanted to get the point across.