Actually, there's a sort of undocumented rule that says preview images have to include freely licensed art, too. Which, of course, means the ripped background violates it.
Here's my attempt at making something that looks more like a barrel at all sizes ;) The first one is 16x24, the second one is 10x17, just like the original.
Yes, it is. In my original comment, the PNG has an indexed palette (the later comments broke it). In this palette, the colors 20 to 23 are supposed to be cycled. The changing colors will imitate animated water.
You can see how color cycling works in GrafX2. Right click on the "Gradient" button and make the following settings:
After that, the waterfall will look just like in the GIF I posted.
This method of imitating animation was also used in lots of 8- and 16-bit games. For a modern example, OpenTTD uses color cycling exclusively to animate water movement and city lights on the map.
Here's a bad attempt at creating a waterfall. It assumes the colors 20-24 in the palette are cycled forwards (which is pretty much how some old games did effects like shining coins and, yes, waterfalls). The first image is the original, the second displays the animation in GIF.
Added a few rock tiles to the bottom of the floating islands. Also recovered bridges that were missing in the actual download, while still being in the preview.
First of all: you seem to use straight lines too often, and this makes your characters look weird. You shouldn't be afraid to use curves. (I tried to remake one of your character's ears to make them somewhat curved - see the attachment below.) Of course, you should be careful with curves, too — check Chapter 2 of the tutorial for an example of a well done and a badly done curve.
Secondly: you seem to have used a lot of different colors and shades for your shading. Just as with outlines, shading in pixel art is done with limited colors and without any fancy brushes.
Talking about shading, your shading is bad. I'm not that good at shading, either, so refer to Chapter 4 of the tutorial above.
To avoid using lots of colors for shading, I'd recommend you to try doing something with a limited palette in the first place. A popular palette on OGA is DawnBringer's 32 color palette, also known as DB32. You should try using it with your images.
Actually, there's a sort of undocumented rule that says preview images have to include freely licensed art, too. Which, of course, means the ripped background violates it.
I wouldn't say they're lower quality. They're in quite a different style.
Here's my attempt at making something that looks more like a barrel at all sizes ;) The first one is 16x24, the second one is 10x17, just like the original.
Yes, it is. In my original comment, the PNG has an indexed palette (the later comments broke it). In this palette, the colors 20 to 23 are supposed to be cycled. The changing colors will imitate animated water.
You can see how color cycling works in GrafX2. Right click on the "Gradient" button and make the following settings:
After that, the waterfall will look just like in the GIF I posted.
This method of imitating animation was also used in lots of 8- and 16-bit games. For a modern example, OpenTTD uses color cycling exclusively to animate water movement and city lights on the map.
Here's my attempt at making some GUI elements. It's the same palette, but lower res.
Here's a bad attempt at creating a waterfall. It assumes the colors 20-24 in the palette are cycled forwards (which is pretty much how some old games did effects like shining coins and, yes, waterfalls). The first image is the original, the second displays the animation in GIF.
Added a few rock tiles to the bottom of the floating islands. Also recovered bridges that were missing in the actual download, while still being in the preview.
Well, gotta first say: welcome to OGA, have fun! This isn't the best place to start doing pixel art (I would recommend PixelJoint), but whatever.
Have you checked out our tutorial on pixel art?
Now to the critique.
First of all: you seem to use straight lines too often, and this makes your characters look weird. You shouldn't be afraid to use curves. (I tried to remake one of your character's ears to make them somewhat curved - see the attachment below.) Of course, you should be careful with curves, too — check Chapter 2 of the tutorial for an example of a well done and a badly done curve.
Secondly: you seem to have used a lot of different colors and shades for your shading. Just as with outlines, shading in pixel art is done with limited colors and without any fancy brushes.
Talking about shading, your shading is bad. I'm not that good at shading, either, so refer to Chapter 4 of the tutorial above.
To avoid using lots of colors for shading, I'd recommend you to try doing something with a limited palette in the first place. A popular palette on OGA is DawnBringer's 32 color palette, also known as DB32. You should try using it with your images.
Here's some 8-bit jacks, queens and kings to go into the empty spaces.
Tried downgrading the image to 24 colors. For some reason.
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