Lol, this is fun stuff. The art itself needs some work, but the concept is sound, and even the weird (verging on creepy) looking faces have a lot of charm still, despite the huge eyes.

There is a lot wrong with the color choice, lighting, and (as said before) the unnaturally large eyes that are almost too big to fit in the skull, and it's hard to know where to start, but I guess I'll start with the animation.

As far as the animation goes, it's actually very charming and well done. There's not a lot to say about it as most of the error comes from pixel technique and color choices/usage than the animation or movement of the pixels themselves, so great job on that!

I won't mention the eyes anymore because it's already been established why they're creepy (skull size / huge dilated pupils) but do consider enlarging the skull to suit the eyes better, or at least adding ears and a little more height to the hair on top of the heads if you want to keep the eye detail. Most skulls have the eye sitting at midway from the top of the head, and hair adds more volume to even that, so keep this in mind, as it will be pretty jarring to others to look at without this rule being followed.

The second thing I need to address, but possibly the most important, is color choice.

If you've looked at any of my recent posts in this section, I've mentioned that pixels represent the "reflection" of light and the diffuse scattering (like super-tiny marbles or ball-bearings) bouncing around across the surface of a 3D object. Some hit and others bounce off, and the further away you get from the center-mass of impact, the more scattering (diffuse) bouncing occurs to the point where no light reflects at all (shadow).

Note that shadow is highly contrast to light intensity, so the brighter a color (luminosity), the more contrast you need in the shadow area to offset the intensity for it to look natural.

That being said, you have WAY too little contrast between your light and shadows. Be sure to increase the distance between these shades a LOT more than you have already. You have way too many colors there that contribute next to nothing to the 3D form due to them lacking contrast, and 3D form is key, so without contrast, you cannot have 3D form.

The final thing to consider is that, since you're representing LIGHT and since every light usually has a "color" or tint to it, you should keep in mind that color when picking your colors and remember to tint them heavily depending on how intense that light is against those colors. If you think you've pushed it too far, push it farther just to be sure, but the key is to be sure to pick a hue that is not what you THINK it should be, but instead is what it actually *should* be in relation to the light's color. Also don't forget about shadows -- they have ambient light, and that ambient light has color too. In most cases, it's the color of the sky instead of the light source (i.e. the yellow sun, and the blue sky are your light/shadow colors, respectively, in an outside scene).

That should get you started.

I apologize if I sounded harsh, but hopefully you'll pick up a few useful things from this.

First of all, thank you for taking the time to give me all these notes, I really appreciate it!
I'm glad the animation turned out alright, everytime I work on something for this game, it's pretty much the first time I do that thing, happy to know I can count on my first dancing animations to look nice for the few seconds they appear!

I have actually tried my best to add ears to everyone in this gif, some are less noticeable than other I guess, looking more like a cheek or part of the head perhaps.. I think the ears are the clearest on Lee Chee (pink girl) Abe Ocado (green guy) and the triplets
About the head size, I tried to keep all my characters 32x32-ish, excluding any form of clothing that may be extending their height,
So when it comes to both the ears and the skull size, I wouldn't be too sure what to change, since in my eyes they look fine, so I can't envision the correct fix, and I wouldn't know how to expand them correctly within my limit

Now.. about the eyes
I know that this is probably what bothered you most out of all, but I'm not really too confident about changing them, see,



This is Cider, the main character, same eyes as the rest.
I got alot of help from Marco Vale on this character, it had about 7-8 different versions until I finally settled for this version.
I try to base everyone off of him, because of how much I liked him.
The eyes are big because the characters are stylized rather than realistic, you can take for example the concept of anime eyes,
or the eyes on the known Megaman sprite
I hope I'm not coming off as ungrateful of your advice by choosing it to be this way.. I rarely "ignore" tips I get on my work, but I think I like them better as they are

I have to admit that color is something that I struggled greatly with ever since I started pixeling
Do you have a set method to create a palette, or do you get a feel for it as you improve as an artist?
I've been using hue-shifting for a long while now, and I still feel like I don't do it entirely right, and it seems every pixel artist does it differently!
Here's what happens to me when I try to take Flora Passif and Straw Berry and raise the contrast on their skin:



it looks really strange.. and I have no idea how to do it correctly!
When I hue shift, I use the HSL board, so when I want a darker color for example, I drag the color a set amount to the right (increasing saturation) and a set amount down (decreasing luminosity), and then I shift the hue slightly towards blue
For brighter colors, I do exactly the opposite, and shift the hue towards yellow

Color is the heart of pixelart, and I hate not being able to handle it right...

So basically, my main issue here are the colors I guess, but I'm not sure where to start..

Started on the NPCs for my game this week
Wasn't sure if this goes here, or in the game project forum, but I'll try here.

The motif of my game is basically "fruit culture"
So everything, from buildings to people, is fruit-themed





Characters from left to right are:

[Bakers] Blue Berry, Straw Berry, [Triplets] Rapel Gapel & Yapel, [Arcade Owner] Flora Passif, [Player Character, instrument shop owner] Cider, [Arcade Frequenter] Lee Chi

*I am 100% pleased with Cider, I got alot of help from Marco Vale on him, included him for reference.

*There are more NPCs to be added, but I wanted to hear some first thoughts on how to improve these sprites!

To walk forward the foot has to move forward, then the body follow it.
This isn't doing that, the feet are just moving up-and-down. It is more like an Irish dance than a walk.

It's stylized according to the length of the legs, I've seen a few games do that
If you think you can make it work better, I'm sure OP would be very thankful for your help, and I would learn something new

Ok so i've tried this, it was that you tried to explain Chironyx ?



Now can we improve again this walk cycle or do you think it looks like great ?

could you post it at a 100% size, without enlarging it?

Hi everyone !

I'm new on this community because i've just started to learn how to "Pixel Art" and i need help for a walk cycle. I already done a walk cycle in 2D for a character in side view, it was the easier way to start learning walk cycle.




But i've just drew a Knight in 3/4 side view and i really dont know how handle feet to simulate a walk cycle. Can some of you demosntrate and draw it to let me understand ? ( sorry for my bad language i'm not English )



Thanks for your help !

Well, I haven't tried it myself so I'm not sure how well it would look, but since your legs are about 4 pixels high and the body is covered in metal and pretty bulky, you could try that cutsie style, where there are only 2 frames, and in each frame one of the leg is lifted by 1 pixel

You can start with that, and if it fits, you can add a few more things, like maybe duplicating those 2 frames to have 4 frames, and making the shoulders move up and down a little too according to the frame