I totally thought that the cat was going to be the PC in this game. I’m a touch crestfallen.
Camera-wise, I feel like the Cave Story camera is very instructive. It’s okay for the character to approach a screen’s edge, but then I like to have the camera accelerate forward, center ahead of the character, to provide a view of where the player is heading.
I could offer some pixel art advice. If I can set up my desk and mouse I could probably get into GIMP and play with some frames to see if I can tweak a few sprites but don’t expect much because I’m stupendously lazy.
Your candy corn, at the moment, looks a lot like a fat lipstick. Part of it is the desaturated colors, but I think a large part of it is the vaguely bullet shape that comes from that very thick, single row of pixels second from the bottom. Maybe fatten that part up vertically a bit in the upwards direction so that there are more rows of that uniformity of thickness.
It would also read a bit better if you slim down the top row of white pixels. As it is, the size transitions are divided up too much along color boundaries.
Yeah, I can see that my advice has had some unintended effects. At this point the best thing may be to just embrace a more triangular shape and just accept that the resolution limits the ability to give the candy soft, rounded edges. My bad.
You might also consider reducing the amount of yellow in exchange for a bit more orange. Doing that could potentially reduce the “belly” of the thing, though possibly at the expense of accuracy to real candy corn–not that accuracy is generally a goal of pixel art, given the near-impossibility of that mandate in conjunction with the given resolution. At this block size there is a need to be simple to avoid appearing overly abstract.
One thing that occurs to me is that you could perhaps round out the appearance of the candy corn slightly by letting the colors move one row down towards a few columns of pixels towards the center of the sprite.
Ultimately I can see that I should probably just have GIMP open and experiment with some of my own ideas instead of suggesting things based purely on the instincts I would otherwise apply therein.
The green things are mushrooms with a bit of a lean in their caps, yes? I had to sort of piece that together from the more traditionally-shaped mushrooms in the latest animation, but when I first saw them I thought they were catnips or funky sprigs of parsley.
Do you think the mushrooms would benefit from having a shadow color to round them out? I am not entirely certain myself.
Are the white, twin vertical structures trellises? Tiny power-line poles? Abstract level elements with no clear intent?
