Nice! Got a working build going. Looks cool so far.
You're not asking for this, but here's a little platformer player characters controls info I recently found and thought was very insightful.
I like eishiya's point on the light aura parented to the player character. Not only does it look inconsistent with the other light auras in the game (it's also rather distracting - why is there a tiny yellow glow emitted from the player?), but I wonder if you might just handle it completely differently - instead of trying to lighten the area around the character, try a vignette to darken the edges of the screen. Would make sense in a night scene and I think it implies the player has a finite viewing distance, especially in Vagante's extreme vignette implementation:
I bet you've played Terraria. More good lighting examples.
Oh man . . . 480x256 is a scary size for a singular piece of pixel art. You may have done some bg tiles that span that size, but have you done any single cohesive scenes at this size? It'll be a project.
Maybe 240x128 instead? Which is double your game's res instead of only a quarter of like your original title screen version. Yeah . . . 480 is massive. Find a way to simplify the task.
As for the character proportions issue, that's an interesting one. I don't see any problem with a larger rendered version of the protagonist having different proportions on the title screen if resolution allows. Very common in games.
I'm reminded of Cave Story+ and how it handled doubling pixel resolution for its sprites.
Personally, I vote for a more realistic looking figure for the title screen. It lets the player know what the character really looks in true form. If you have any portrait art in the game using large enough sprites, it would likely use these same realistic proportions as well.
You're the art dude for this one - make a call, commit to it, and keep going.
