so here was just the background, after I cleaned up the palette a bit:


Here was just some basic layout of some of the tiled stuff:


and here it was with the actual tiles, incase anyone wants to look at those:


Here is some meat stuff I drew to work on terrain before background locked my palette in, which I think turned out a lot better for palette but it has weird depth and I'm having trouble with depth and lighting so far.


Here is a really bad dude sprite:


And here is a pretty cool sprite that I'm pretty happy with, although it's pretty flat.




I know there are a couple of paint artifacts from using MS paint, especially in the desert one. Since the original background was drawn, I've moved over to Grafx2, GraphicsGale and Photoshop.

The guy I need to start from scratch with a completely different form. I literally cannot animate this guy running, it's very awkward and his muscles are ridiculous.

I drew the vast majority of this in the course of about 2-3 months when I started picking all this up. I'm working on a project with probably too large of a scale (learn GMS, do pixel art, do music, make game out of like 100 pages of design material I've been putting together for years) and am having trouble feeling like I'm making progress, so I'm hoping for some criticism to get me moving in the right direction - and yes, I poured over the noobtorials and resources, just having trouble moving forward. :)