hahaha yeah its kind of intense :D 

well, in the actual game, of course, it would all be either greyscale or greenscale, so the red is just for show. I have tried it with other colors(including the gray this site uses), but none of them have the same impact that I was after, the contrast between greyscale and saturation.

thanks dude. I'm pretty proud of this one. its deceptively complicated.

"edges of the face look a bit rushed"

agreed and fixed, my good man!

thanks :)

I think the best way I can explain the untraditional color count is to tell you that my overall goal with the piece was individuality. thats really the theme here. so the first thing I did was to make tons of custom colors without regard to any limited palette, to insure that no part of any character was the same (overall)color as any part of any other character.

now, obviously I fantacized about seeing these characters animated in a real videogame. but the thing is, I tend to go all out when I make a decision about Retro vs Modern style pixel art. if I go the modern route, like this, I prefer to just not worry about color count whatsoever, just focus on making the pixels look good.

hahaha oh wow, you do NOT wanna see this with a medium gray background, trust me on this!! I don't mean to disrespect the rules for this site, but this was drawn on a white background, and any color thats not very very light in value will look bad against the characters. the white is giving it a vital conrast with the black in the outlines. lol I know its weird... I guess in a game there would need to be some kind of constant stylistic glow effect around their sprites for them to look good in the world. could be interesting to see though.

thanks man! glad you like it.

oh the dithering? well, its supposed to suggest the texture of sand/dirt. the idea was that the face is shown "buried" in the sand to indicate that their home is underground. I at first was going to do a regular gradient-type background around the face, but I wanted to make the background more specific.

it totally is!