dougeff wrote:There is a joke in the Discworld 2 game, where he makes fun of a movie set backdrop that was "apparently painted without reference material". Look at real trees. Research how other games handled trees.
This is good advice. Even if you're doing heavily stylized graphics, looking at good reference pictures will help you choose what to emphasize/distort/replace/maintain.
Sogona wrote:Yeah, the main character does only use one palette (black outline, caucasian skin, and brown for the hair and pants)
I can think of very few cases where NES sprites turned out good when using black outlines and a single palette, and if you think about it, wasting 33% of the colors just on outlines doesn't sound very sensible.
I personally don't like sprite outlines, but if you really must have them, maybe it would be better to use a dark shade of an actual color that you can reuse. You could easily use the same dark brown for outlines, pants and hair, freeing one slot for a more interesting color. You can highlight the brown areas using a light shade so that they don't look flat. Just an idea.
There's something weird about the animation too, because the guy projects his body forward when attacking down but not when attacking right or up. These are supposed to be different views of the same movement, so they should match.
This is actually another good opportunity to use reference material. Watch videos/animations of sword fights, or even try to do these movements yourself. When people make a stabbing movement, they usually put one foot forward, for balance. Your character is currently bending his knees or doing nothing with his legs (depending from where you're looking), so that's definitely something that can be improved.