It's lighter than normal for me because of my theme- which I assume means it blends in quite well with the standard pixel joint gray- but the it's also noticeably larger, like when you increase the size of the font in a school assignment to fill an extra half page.
As for the image itself; it's quite nice, although the shape is very sharp and geometrical while the shading is relatively rounded and soft. For cut gems like this, the highlighting should mostly be concentrated in one "cell" while the rest of the faces can be lit up at the other side and the bottom by internal reflections and/or backlight in a somewhat structured but mostly just cool-looking way. A perfect example of what I'm talking about is the Chaos Emerald sprites from various Sonic games, just search for that and you'll get a whole pile of results.
yeah its dark for me too.
not sure what happened there :\
Hmm... Is my description text really dark to anyone else?
Thanks for the advice. I looked at the chaos emeralds you suggested and I see what you mean about making the facets sharper, but I experimented with that approach before I ended up with the softer appearance I have now and decided it didn't match the style I have in mind. Though I really do like the seethrough quality of gems.
I actually posted a game play gif of what stuff I have prototyped so far if you want to see what it looks like without a solid background color:
http://lukelanfaust.tumblr.com/post/100602129435/