[WIP] Cats and aliens

[Jimp]

Hey there! I'm new here, and pretty new to pixel art altogether. I've been doing art for Flash and iPhone games for a few years now (portfolio here), and recently I decided to try out some pixel art for a new challenge and to build up my skills.

I recently started my first pixel art game, and thought I would join up here and post some examples for feedback and critique Seems like a cool place and I'm getting more and more into pixel art so hopefully I'm here to stay!

Heres some of the in game assets:


Some idle animations for the enemies - these will play occasionally rather than loop. I can't figure out how to embed .swfs, although I've already noticed errors seeing them at a bigger size!
http://www.artjimp.com/share/aliens/sprites.swf

Some level backgrounds:


Looping textures for levels:


Gameplay will be block remover style, but with other stuff to press like switches and cannons etc. Basically aliens are "attacking" earth, and cats are the only things that will harm them The red boxes are the boxes you can remove, I'm not sure if that is obvious enough yet? Anyway this is pretty much what we've got so far, critique would be greatly appreciated!

[Pixelicious]

I'm still a newbie at pixel art, so take my critique with a grain of salt

I love the backgrounds, the simplified silhouettes are great! the clouds look more like fluffy mountains than clouds to my eyes Also the moon has a lot of detail compared to the other elements in the background, so to me it doesn't fit the style being so detailed It's very good looking tho!

about anims:
- What is the first guy doing? Crying? angry? tired? Maybe you could visualise it more with the eyes.
- I like the 2nd guy a lot.

hope this helps!

[pistachio]

The simple lineart and flat colors of the level backgrounds look cool, but don't fit with the style of the clouds, or moon, which is much more realistic. I wonder who pixelled that moon by the way, if it wasn't done by way of some image processing program. It looks great.

[jams0988]

I agree with Pistachio that the moon looks the best out of everything you posted, by a large margin, so I'm wondering where it came from, too. Was it a free resource, an image edit? Or are you just really good at drawing moons for some reason? It looks so cool! X3

The backgrounds look pretty nice, too. I think the stuff you need to work on most are the foreground elements. They're not quite as good as the backgrounds. The main quick fix I'll offer you is to up the contrast between the shaded and lighted areas of your foreground sprites; your shadows are really hard to tell from your lighted areas!

Pretty cute artwork overall, though. =)