It definitely stops it from standing out as obvious to my eye so yes, looks better 
A hint of shadow wouldn't go astray either:

I like that.

Contrast should be lower in the darkness, shouldn't it ?

When playing with shadows, don't forget these 3 parameters...

Guys my palette is only 16 colors. I mean, it's a FAKE limitation, since I want to do some kind of shadow overlay thing later (I mocked it up somewhere) but I'm still only using 16 colors for the tiles and everything.
Here's my palette:

I'm not really using the top pink and purple much, but I don't think another blue-green would add a lot. (Would it? I know human eyes are really sensitive to greens. Maybe I need a warm green, or a cooler medium grey?) I guess I was going to use that purple for neato purple shadows or something but I never did and it just ended up another not-quite-black that's too saturated to use for much anti-aliasing but fills out my purple/pink color ramp. (Edit: Actually, I'm using it in my floorboard tiles so that's something I guess.) That background dark grey is not actually part of my palette, I just don't like the bright color of the forums these days...?

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For the walls close to the player, I was thinking of doing something like this, like the wall is cut out?

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New death animation. Mocked up a little blood spatter effect just to see what it would look like but it's not finished or anything.

Two things. I've always heard the common rule in pixel art is "No Black."
...
Also, the perspective seems off if this is going to be for a RPG.

The rules are really more like guidelines. These are meant for particularly dark backgrounds. I hate to just cry, "It's my style!" when faced with critique but this is one of those things that I think really is a stylistic thing. (I mean, if it looks bad, I'll change it, but "that's the rule" isn't really a good enough reason for me when I like how it looks just fine. But really though, does it look bad? Because if that's the case....)

I had a long discussion about the perspective earlier in the thread and I decided on a more side-on one after a lot of thought.

For the light skin, maybe this would suit your needs. I don't know if you tried it and didn't like the look of it, but I think it looks okay.

I did try that and I didn't like it. It looks good there, but surrounded by the other sprites, it looks washed-out and sickly and maybe like an alien or something. XD If I nudged the color to be a little more saturated/warmer, maybe, but I'm not sure I want to alter everything else in the game with that color. I'll tweak it a bit and try it out? Thanks for the input!

->
Changed two colors to make them look nicer as skin tones. Doesn't seem to have broken the world yet.

I've still been dicking around with character concepts and sprites, as you can see. Still no new mockup.

New stuff.


Some characters. Tried out different heights, builds, etc. Skin tones are a challenge with this palette at such a small scale. There's like a total of two nice ones. I don't like the wonky attempt I made at something more pale. It's fine, though. I'll stick with approximating and rely on the portraits to be more precise~


Concept pixels for the shadow creatures. Tough to make silhouette-type creatures at such a small scale. Still working on them.

Mockup:

Tiles:


There's about a million things I don't like about this but I'll just wait for some crits because I'm totally exhausted with it at the moment. I tried some different things with the sprite.

Here's the original concept sprite thing for the main character:

We decided to go much smaller, and the hair was changed somewhat. And here is the concept art for the forest. I'd like to try to stick to that sort of color/atmosphere.

I know the colors are a little all over the place; I'll fix them up soon.