I'm in the midst of creating a videogame screenshot mockup for general pixelart practice. The general scheme I'm going for is the Game Boy Color's palette, as seen in the "Mock the Ocean's Sphere" thread.
The idea is a RPG battle set in a graveyard - four (!) characters on the hero's team, and a giant mook and braggart/archrival on the 'bad' side. Each is color-coded (red/blue/yellow/black/green) save for the giant mook, whom I'm still working on. Some draft designs:

Generic tree.

Initial graveyard locale. Nice top-down view, but considering switiching out for a more side-on approach. Beta designs of characters (brown/yellow-coloured character currently being 'worked on' as we speak - it really looks unreadable there).

Progress shot of three characters. I'll post more as they're finished.
The big question I have is: how do you get the absolute most out of the absolute least? That is, how would you be able to create great sprites like the ones from the GBC Blue Ocean or SNES Final Fantasy games with such a small size and smaller palette? It's really quite frustrating, especially if your first thoughts on such a project were as ignorant as mine ("Oh, fewer pixels, quicker job!").
22/09/09 Edit:
