I drew this little space man for a game I'm working on. He has a transparent glass bubble helmet.

But I'm not a very good artist. I was wondering if I could get some help with this.

He needs to fit in 16x16 pixel squares and be in 2-bit color. (that's four colors, except I'm cheating to also add transparency as a "fifth color") I'm going to be using palette swapping to be able to change the colors of my artwork at runtime. I'll probably separate out his head and helmet into a separate sprite eventually so that I can make more characters with the same body just by swapping out different heads and changing the head colors.

What I need help with: I want to make more sheets of him where he is shooting some kind of gun facing in all these directions. Or maybe he has hand blasts like Iron Man, I dunno. Whatever's easiest to draw.

The really challenging thing is that I want the projectiles coming out of his gun, in both horizontal and vertical directions, to be centered in the middle of the tile. Maybe he holds a rifle-like kind of laser gun in both hands? Or maybe just have him act like he's throwing the projectiles?

If I could get him pushing and throwing things (just being in the appropriate poses for that) then that would help me as well. I'm also totally open to giving him a better walk cycle or anything that would have him make more physical sense within these technical constraints. Also maybe him being dead, taking damage, jumping, flying, climbing, nodding, sleeping, dancing or doing anything else cool that occurs to you.

Also very interested in getting more 16x16 2-bit art in general. I have a hard rule on this project that all art assets must be allow me to swap palettes at runtime. This is gonna be a very proc-gen heavy kind of game. This little guy should be inhabiting a world that looks alot like the overworld from Final Fantasy 1 (NES) except it could be almost any color combination. I'm also trying to figure out the best way to have 16x16 pixel art map tiles.

My little space man drawing there is public domain as far as I'm concerned, but I would informally request that anyone who contributes to it please do not add the evil "Non-Commercial" option to any license you add to artwork derived from it. I need to be able to use this in games that could eventually be in a commercial release, although I plan to also keep them open source. If you help then you will totally get credit.

I'm working on trying to reduce the blowhard chronicles art by surt to 2-bit for this. I was kind of following the general pattern of his characters to make this space man.

This game was originally going to be a demake of No Man's Sky but since No Man's Sky was received so poorly, I'm thinking this is going to be more of an "8-bit game a little bit like No Man's Sky except done right."

Part of the reason I thought it was a good idea to request this here is because I think any art you make based on this would be helpful to many more projects than just mine. Having nice little 16x16 characters like this ready to go would be awesome for game jams, just generally, because a little space man who shoots things seems like a really obvious common simple video game art use case.