Thanks for the positive feedback on this!
I'd like to clarify that I'm not really trying to get all that close to Flashback, the title says it as a joke (heck, I haven't even finished the game) - I was studying its style (or rather, Helms work from years ago) not to recreate it or really try and capture the feeling, I was doing it to become a better pixel artist. This may sound obvious but maybe I haven't made that clear before! As long as it's nice and people like it, I could give a rat's ass about whether it feels like Flashback or not!
I will work over the player character, Helm, no worries. Haven't started working on him at all (apart from trying out giving him those shades, that is) - the way I do these things is start out with a non-shaded version, then I work out the frames for the main animations (including idleing [breathing for example], running, walking, jumping etc.) and THEN I'll refine the shading. This usually shifts the focus from the single sprites to the animations, somewhat like Metal Slug does it, hopefully resulting in fluid animations rather than extremely well worked out single frames. Of course, for those frames that the player will be looking at un- or barely animated for a longer time, I'll actually make sure these look adequate (such as the standing frame).
More wall stuff (segmentations) is planned, I will draw the tiles in-game (if it ever comes to this) in three layers, one background (for the walls and everything far in the back), the object layer (which is still drawn behind the player, but in front of the walls [for the rails that are further away for example]) and the foreground stuff (which will be drawn in front of the player [for the rails in front of the player, the "front" parts of the gates etc.]). I was just too lazy to work these segmentations into more parts of the mock-up because I work with Pro Motion which doesn't support layers and I'd have to shift a lot of pixels.
I will work on the bar colors some more, I agree they're not perfect yet, thanks for the input there!
Dex: This is intended as a mock-up, not a stand-alone pixel art piece/scene. The enemies are all standing around there but they will be animated in the game, just don't have them that far yet. Hope this makes sense!
