nice one :D

Wow! I didn't expect such in-depth analysis on my first posted sprite:) Thank you so much for taking the time and writing all of that!

First of all, the reason the creature is called Icygross is because it reminded me of Metagross after I completed it, not the other way around, but that's not that important.

About the texture, yes, it doesn't look very icy. Our game implements specular maps that add reflectiveness to tiles, and create highlights on objects when hit by light. That's why there isn't a clear light source and highlights on the sprite. To be fair, I could have made the tiles semi-transparent, I didn't do that due to lack of time, mostly. We needed screenshots to show off on the kickstarter page, and we were running low on time and quantity of enemies, so I ended up pumping out as many enemy sprites as possible. This in my opinion was one of the better ones.

You're definitely right about the weight of the creature. It feels a little too mechanical and doesn't convey much weight at all. Lack of time is in part responsible for this, but also my general unfamiliarity with animation.

About the lightsources in the game: we had dynamic lights and shadows implemented for a while in the game, but the addition of Spritelamp was very recent. Personally I feel it resolves a lot of issues and answers many questions like "do I bake in a lightsource on my pixel art, or keep it flatter? Do we need outlines at all? Do I need to think about my sprite looking good in-game as it is, or as it may appear with lights implemented?" I'm working more with spritelamp lately, and figuring out the best way to create pixel art for Elysian Shadows, so it's practically certain that I'll have to redo all of my sprites and tiles either way.

Thanks again for the feedback! I'll definitely improve the look and animation of this enemy in the near future. :)

If you're interested in seeing me creating pixel art for ES and trying to figure out how to find the best style that will suit the game, you can subscribe to me on Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSyamEaVNrAig7Hxa1kzizg

First-off: Welcome to Pixel Joint and I'm really glad you're coming here to both reveal some behind-the-scenes art stuff and seek aid for improving the Elysian Shadows art - just the atttude to do this warms me on the campaign. I hope all the best for the game, one of my friends is super excited about it.

To the piece! I could elaborate on a bunch of stuff if you really want to optimize this piece, but for now I'll just give a couple highlights to think about. If you are interested in working more specifically I'm totally up for helping :)

The design of the character is pretty intersting - judging by the title, I imagine it's inspired by Metagross. The description of the enemy's purpose lends a lot of context to the piece, but raises a couple issues.

* For a character made of ice, the texture doesn't actually look all that icy. It looks more like blue stone. The big properties of ice would be something like: transparency (which at least seems like it would lend itself to a less-deep blue, as true transparency isn't really practical for a sprite), reflectiveness (more specifically, very strong highlights were the light concentrates), and generally very angular edges when the ice hasn't been sculpted. Hopefully that makes sense.

* Judging by the enemy's purpose (stomping, knocking you off) it seems like there should be more weight to the animation. The regularity of its motion keeps it from seeming 'heavy'. A weightier motion would have the lift-up of the legs be longer followed by a swift drop to the ground.

* In a pixel sense, rather than a conceptual sense, there's some jagged edges where the outline is inconsistent, with the most obvious being the gap in the outline on the leg to the back right. In general I would pay close attention to the clusters. I know that the game has some funny lightsource tech running in it, but what are you doing for the lightsource here? If you don't mind, I'm actually curious what it's like in general making sprite assets for a game that'll be running that SpriteLamp tech - do you have to do anything special? How much of the game runs on that tech and how much is made in a more traditional way? If you can answer those things of course.

Looking forward to seeing what else you'll be putting together for the game! Good luck with the campaign :3