(this is the old art, so hopefully it looks much worse. please critique the new one which can be found on the latest reply on this post)


hey guys, i've been working on a game quite a while, been doing the "pixel art" for it, it looks bad, i know, but im trying to improve it, so yeah....
heres the game overall


heres a character


heres a weapon that i like


and last but not least, a simple platform tile


I'd definetely love some feedback for all of em, please, would really help

thanks

Ninja looks flat and has anatomy problems. Is that intended?

the gun and the platform have too many colors that are too close to each other
looks out of focus and mushy and blurry

heres the platform on more solid colors
but other then that, is it okaysh?

First off: you don’t need to upscale your work for viewability reasons here, as the forums allow you to zoom in on images by clicking them.

Now, as to the actual meat of this critique.

Your ninja sprite suffers from a lack of quality shading, and it features visible banding in various areas (notably his top, his sword, and…whatever that is coming out the back of his hood). The anatomy also seems wonky, in that his torso looks far too large for his body.

The gun and the platform look well-designed, but they both suffer from a similar problem: you’ve used too many colors in an attempt to “detail” those things. The platform, for example, has about 180 colors. You realistlically need only about a tenth that many colors—maybe less—to keep the general shape and look of the platform intact.

As for the whole scene at the top of your original post: it’s not just far too busy, it’s nigh unreadable. You’ve done little to separate the background from the foreground; in a general sense, a background object should have less saturation than your foreground objects/sprites so the foreground contrasts against (or “pops”) against the background, which makes it easy for players to figure out what is and isn’t a foreground object. When everything looks like a possible platform, players won’t know if something is or isn’t a platform on sight alone. The clash in art styles between different background objects makes the whole scene look bad, too.

The best pieces in your OP are the gun and the platform—they both have a solid design marred only by an overuse of unnecessary color. I try to pass this bit of advice on to others when I can, and I certainly think it applies here: pixel art is a form of minimalist art, so always ask yourself how you can do more with less. Try cutting down the number of colors in your platform to 18 or less so you can see how much of that “detail” is actually necessary.

wow man thanks so much for the tips
that really helps
About upscalling the images on the forum here, well, i just dont know how to scale them normally lol

Also, i fixed the platform problem, i think it looks better, i posted it, too, so you can take a look and tell how it is now...

for the backgrounds, yes i absolutely agree with what you said about the styles, my work is absolutely different from the other artist, he's much better but he's style is different, so yeah that happens...

ill also try fixing that of the saturation thing you said, i'll try to take the saturation off from the background and make...maybe...less confusing things hopefully, but other than that, is it bad?

lol thats the problem, they're pretty much all different...

hey thanks for the feedback, also, this is the platform kinda fixed, with much less different types of colour
1

I recommend you to learn basic theory of lighting (if you don't know it yet, of course) - how does light "works", how to shade basic forms like sphere, cylinder cube and cone (that's really easy, trust me) - you can learn not only from pixel art tutorials, but traditional/digital art tutorials too (search "basic lighting theory" on youtube for example). And after you learned some really basics - try to "break up" your main form into this primitives when you're going to shade it.
And I also want to give another lighting tip.

I see you have a texture on your trees, but you have no lighting on them. And even if you draw very amazingly cool texture, that is rightly shadowed - the whole object will still look flat. Because texture IS shadowed, while the OBJECT isn't. It's the mistake I was always doing until I understood what's wrong with it. So when you shade your object (like tree) - shade the whole form first, then shade your details.
Maybe it's not always true for pixelart, but it's really cool tip, because it very simple and uses amazing principle "from general to specific".

Here's an example on what do I mean:

1. Just "idea" of our future object
2. Basic lighting
3.1. Example of some details - see how does that cracks look? They look like they are really "attached" to the main form, they are part of it.
3.1. Another example of details - simple texture
And also colored example of that thing :)

how do i upload the image without using imgur?

The hugeness is coming from your game engine, so there's no way to (losslessly) reduce the size. Normally I would suggest that you set it to render so that the sprites are rendered 1:1, but since your sprites are all different sizes, that's probably difficult :/ Sticking to a single scale would make rendering easier, another reason to put the work in xP

You should definitely put the work in if you want your game to look good. I'd suggest reworking all the art to be the same size still. And you shouldn't really trust real life friends on this, often people say good things to encourage you and not hurt your feelings. But on the internet people dont need to worry about that, and can say how it really is. So yeah.. anyway, just look at any professional pixel-art game, you will not see mixed pixel sizes like this anywhere. If you do see it, it will be for a reason, like things closer having bigger resolution to give depth, etc.
Like in this game for example -

The closest light poles are scaled up, but even then they're blurred to give a nice effect. But notice how the rest is all the same pixels.

You still upload to imgur, you just don't zoom in before taking the screenshot.

i know what you mean, but redoing absolutely EVERYTHING is off charts, just wont happen sorry, but yea ill try fixing things like the tree, which looks absolutely out of proportion...
but what i really want to know is in a scale from 0 to 10, how good does it look...
(10 being amazing, 0 being awful)

dude, the problem is that this isnt the only stage, redoing this one should be okay, its not THAT much work, and i might be able to redo it just fine, but the other things are also probably on a different scale...

I dont like giving peoples art ratings on a 10 scale, as it's all very subjective. But If you really want to know, i'd give it a 2/10 right now, and it's only how I think. It looks very clashing, it's hard to understand what's what, and it's just so dirty. Most of that comes right from the mixed pixel-sizes. And sadly if you do not fix the pixel size issues, I dont think it will ever look any better. It's just too much mixed resolutions and mixed styles that's it's better to just scrap it all and start over, even though it feels like 6months are going to waste. In reality they're not, as you learned a lot in that time probably.
Game development is hard and takes a lot of time to come up with something good, so you better be willing to put in the work, if you want your game to be of any significance. Otherwise it might end up as just another amateur game that noone plays. (believe me, I know, I've been there)
Sorry to be so harsh, that's just how I see it.

not harsh at all, i understand you're just saying what you think, and i do agree, i think its pretty bad aswell, but the thing is that, even undertale for example is pretty damn sh*tty, terrible pixel art, but still a great game, see where im going, but yea well, about the pixel sizes, to be fair im not sure if that would help SO much, but ill try keeping an eye out on that, also try to remake some things that are waaaaay too out of scale

Yeah undertale has bad art, but that's not why it's doing so well. It's doing well because of the story and everything else. Imagine if it had good art it probably would have even a lot more sales. And even if the art is bad, it still is all in the same style, no mixed resolutions and things like that unlike your game, which has about 5 different styles and god knows how many different resolutions mixed.

But well anyway, in the end it depends on what do you want to do with the game, if you're just making it for yourself, or for practice, or if you want to make money with it.

Neither do I. But who cares? You can improve your skill with pixel art just as you can with any other form of art. We’ll help you improve, too—so long as you don’t mind a little critique.

By the way: that platform? The one I said suffered from an overuse of color? The base design for it is better than anything I could even try to do as an equivalent. I dumped all my skill points into the SPRITE stat, so to speak, so I have little-to-no idea of how to properly make backgrounds and things like that platform. (And I haven't been practicing my art lately, pixel or otherwise, so I’m a bit underdeveloped in my skills besides.)

I understand the impulse to be one’s own worst critic. A healthy dose of humility can help keep you grounded as you improve your skills. But telling yourself that you have no talent? That’s far too harsh. Don’t go that far with that impulse. It only makes you feel like sh*t.

And as it concerns failure? Don’t fear it. You learn more from failures than you do from successes. If you see a new technique or a new way of doing things, experiment with it, even if the results turn out less-than-good. One of the most recent things I tried to do was create a standing male “base” sprite that, if I’d succeeded, I would’ve used in the future for a personal project. (Not a game, just an idea I’d had in mind.) I failed at making it look as good as I wanted, sure. But I learned a fair bit about the construction and anatomy of smaller sprites in the process, and I’ll use that knowledge the next time I work on a smaller sprite. I didn’t fear faiure—and you’d do well not to, either.

you have talent for pixelart. You will improve over time.

Yeah. Was just saying, kid is clearly cut out to make games by himself, just a matter of not quitting and not being stuck for too long.

well as i just said i dont think i have talent, at least definetely not for pixel art, and saying that i dont doesnt make me feel like sh*t, its just the truth, im always sincere about my work
eishiya, kinda agree with you, talent in my opinion is simply being faster than other people to learn something, thats it, nothing else
and yeah buffy, definetely wont be stopping and yeah, trying to finish it as fast as i can
bluedxca93
thanks for saying that it doesnt look bad (even though i think it is now lol)
but yea it still means something

The flat part of the grass doesn't really feel like it's a different plane from the grass on the vertical side of the platform. Also, if it's grass, why is it so flat? If you're trying to show really short grass (like on a closely-cropped lawn), you probably shouldn't be using long green lines on the tile. If it's meant to be unmowed, longer grass, it should stick up out of the platform.

Remember that the flat parts of the platforms recede into space. Use that to your advantage. You can layer things on there, the parts growing out of the platform in front can overlap the parts in back. This can help you convey that the platform is flat, even though it involves actually adding vertical elements rather than horizontal ones.


The desert platform looks weird to me it looks like you have sand that's hanging off it. Sand doesn't do that. If sand can fall, it does. You can get pools of sand, but you're not going to get strings of sand. It's not like ice that makes icicles, or snow that clings to itself. Try to make the desert platforms be mostly rock, with a little bit of sand in the really flat and depressed areas.
Speaking of the rock, look at some real rocks that you see in deserts. There are many kinds of deserts, with many kinds of rocks, but they all have some shared traits because they're in arid, wind-swept areas. The Utah desert has different rock types from the Atacama desert, and the Sahara desert's rocky parts have different rocks still. But you'll find that they all have strata (layers), and horizontal and diagonal grooves from where they have been eroded by windswept sand. Pay attention to the colours, too. Which of these photos feels more desert-like to you? They're all deserts, but the human mind associated some colours more with deserts than others. Use those associations in your art. Your rocks feel rather greenish.

The ice/snow platform doesn't feel very cold. The rocks are very warm-coloured, so it doesn't feel icy at all. That may not be a problem, depending on the feel you're going for. If you want the ice level to feel cold, use cooler colours. Other than that, it reads well. The rocks don't make much sense, the platform looks like a clump of separate rocks held together by a mysterious force, rather than a chunk of rock/rocky-earth that is levitating or sticking out of something. Again, look at real rocks for inspiration and reference for texture. It's pretty rare to see clumps-of-many-rocks in real life, so they don't look very good in fiction either, even though they're not impossible.

The ammo box doesn't really read to me. It also doesn't seem to be in the same perspective as the rest of the game. I think it would benefit from being redrawn to fit with the game's slightly-from-above sideview perspective, and with less detail. You could also use some existing iconic boxes, like these army ammo boxes. They're pretty common among civilians too, usually as army surplus, but sometimes stolen.

Is the wood meant to be a floor, or a wall? As a floor, it doesn't fit the perspective of the game, as a wall, that structure doesn't really make sense.
In either case, as a background, it has too much contrast. I think if you lighten the three darkest colours, and maybe even merge them all into the lightest shadow colour, it would serve better as the background.

It's okay to not have a lot of detail on things. When working at small scales, you can't have everything, you need to choose what's most important to convey. And with games, everything has to read immediately, players can't usually spend time looking at the details, so the art has to read immediately and well. That includes not just the sprites and textures themselves, but their interactions. If a character stands in front of a background, the player should be able to identify them and their position immediately, without having to look directly at them or search for them (unless camouflage like that is a game mechanic, of course).

The weapon sprites have nice silhouettes, but the colouring still feels dull. You're using more colours than you need, and they still don't have much contrast. Also, try to get away from using neutral greys. You can get much more interesting visuals by playing with hue more. Even real guns are rarely neutral grey.


The main menu, frankly, feels "janky". It's very noisy, it has unevenly scaled pixels, it's mising resolutions for no apparent reason, the colours have no unity, nothing about the art suggests what kind of game this is... It just feels very unappealing, overall. The level art has its issues, but it's much better than that, so you're doing your game a disservice with that menu.
But, I'd leave it as-is for now. Get your level art together for now, get it to a state where the style is to your liking and feels consistent throughout the game. Then, when you have a solid visual identity for the game, you'll be in a much better place to create a menu that can represent your game.


Overall, the backgrounds and especially the screenshot feel very noisy, to the point of distracting me from the important stuff (the character sprites and action). Simplify the by eliminating unnecessary detail, and focus on making the colours work together not just within each tile, but within each level. Colours seem to be a major struggle for you currently. Colour is a huge topic so it's difficult to find adequate articles about it, but here's a good start (don't miss part 2 linked in the description). You may also want to study light, as that will help inform your colour choices and build more cohesive levels.

There is definitely improvement, don't worry :] Some problems are still there (e.g. noisiness) but overall you are moving in a good direction.