I've just started working on the graphics for a simple 5-player tank game. The game uses a 16 colour palette, however two colours are unusable for the sprites because of the way the game is coded, and colour 0 is transparent, so also can't be used for the sprites. That means I have a grand total of 13 colours to use for the backgrounds and sprites for the game.

Each tank has to be colour coded, there are five players in the game: Blue, Red, Green, Purple and Yellow.

Anyway, I want to try and do all the graphics in a top-down but slightly angled perspective, similar to Cannon Fodder, but these graphics have to be even smaller and simpler.

So, here's what I've whipped up so far. The five coloured tanks are the only ones that will be used in the game, but I just made a default-coloured tank for fun and put it there. Underneath you can see the original sprite that the game used, and a slightly tweaked version I made before I decided to redraw the whole thing from scratch.



I haven't got any reference pics, so if anyone can maybe suggest a game with graphics similar to this perspective and scale, I'd like to check out how they've done it. The tank will have to face eight directions when it's finished. I really would like to come up with a better design for it before I go drawing the other directions though.

So, any suggestions or critique?

Thanks.