I really hope you can get someone to help you with this; I love the concept shots you've posted so far, and I think this is something that needs to happen. Sadly, I'm not a coder; all I could contribute would be music/sounds.

Okay, I found a couple of palette generators.

http://nine.frenchboys.net/palette.php
This one will generate 5 random colours. You could perhaps use these as the base colours for your palette, and then add a lighter and a darker version for highlight and shadow, along with black and white.

http://defmech.com/color/
This one is much closer to our needs, as it will create a palette of 9 harmonious colours. It only generates two distinct colours, with highlight and shadow, and three shades of grey, so it may be a little limiting to create a whole game using just those. Still, that could be part of the charm!

Now we just need a good method for generating tilesets, and optionally some kind of generative music; I know that a few guys on here have experimented with the latter before.

Finally, how hard is it for you to reach the exit on the bottom of the screen?

Almost impossible. Without your hint I wouldn't have known I was supposed to go down there in the first place, and once I did figure out what I was supposed to do, the tiny window required to stop the drop kick before hitting the deadly wall on the left made it an incredibly fiddly manoeuvre. I made it through two times out of about 30, and then when I saw what you were asking me to do (and once I found out that I didn't have room to jump without hitting my head on the deadly ceiling), I gave up.

I realise this section is most likely taken out of context, but you'd have to do a lot of work prior to this in order to familiarise the player with what they have to do, and with the techniques to do it. Even so, I think it's just too fiddly, with too little room for error, for it to be enjoyable.

This is almost a rotoscoped pixel music video.

I liked SotC's ending as well, just because it left so much to the imagination (unless I'm just dense and missed the point).

did you play ico?

Yup.

Notice anything odd about the baby in the ending of SotC?

...the MIDIBox SID Interface

This is the sexiest thing ever, and I've wanted one for such a long time now. I'll check your stuff out on 8bitpeoples soon!

One of my favourite game endings was Shenmue 2. Well, okay, it had the start of a new chapter, but it took place in a completely different location; I still remember how it was to walk down those pathways with flowers either side.  It also came with an opening-up of the narrative, beautiful hints of what was to come in the next game.

I agree entirely with this. A lot of people hated Shenmue 2's ending because it had no great boss fight; in fact, the entirety of the 4th disc was spent walking along a path, talking to a girl. The game's 'climax' is at the end of the 3rd disc; if you keep this in mind, it becomes clear that the whole of the last disc is the game's ending, and you're playing it. It's such a shame that the 3rd game in the series was never released.

And this leads me to my point; some of the best endings in recent memory, for me, are those that involve the player in some way; Without wanting to spoil things, Shadow of the Colossus did this, and so did Braid. And ICO, to a lesser extent. Are there any other games that did this?

So, I decree that there must be a compo from this, pronto!  Also, we could pair it with a site that randomly generates harmonious colour palettes, and our entries would have to use characters (and terrain?) from the pixel generator and colour from the colour generator.

And even if we don't do that compo, I may just make a quick game that way anyway.

I'd be down for this. Game Maker's been sitting on my desktop for all too long; it's about time I played around with it, and this would make spriting a whole lot quicker. Anybody know of any palette-generation sites, then? I'm not entirely sure Kelsey's generator would work so well for terrain. I've had a brief look online, and the only thing I've been able to find is this, which generates top-down cave maps. Not particularly useful!

At any rate, I think Kelsey should make a game about a bipedal elephant with a koala on its back.

New holstered run animation (feedback welcome- I'm not a very experienced animator, and this doesn't feel heavy enough yet)

This is much better than the previous run cycle. I had a look at it again, and it does look kind of strange by comparison; the motion in this one is much more natural. Quite an achievement considering the limited number of pixels!

By the way, I don't know how you feel about having a full playthrough of your game on Vimeo. I can take it down if you want.

The bipedal elephant was the first thing to jump out at me in your image, too.

what about the koala on its back?

Oh man, how did I miss that?

smn's was kind of a no-brainer, as it's such a great shot. My second vote went to Jackson, for his grainy-atmospheric night shot. It's inspired me to practice night photography myself!

Nice!

The bipedal elephant was the first thing to jump out at me in your image, too.

Imagine a competition to create a game solely populated by sprites found in a single image created by that generator. Animating them would be fun!

Okay, my playthrough and feedback are up on Vimeo. Here's the main playthrough

Some points that aren't really covered in the video:

• I really like the controls; they're instantly responsive and pixel-perfect, which allows for a lot of precision movement. I can't think of anything I would change about them.
• I mentioned wanting a one-second delay after dying. Considering what you said above, if probably would break gameflow. The times when it would be most useful are when you die quite some distance from the previous checkpoint and the camera has to scroll back; it's quite easy to keep holding left and charge into a pit without realising it. I do like the fact that there's no death time, though. The only thing I could suggest is to make sure none of the checkpoints are next to pits or enemies.
• The 'Corridor of Pain' at the end of level 9. As you can see in the video, it all kind of fell apart for me when I came across the enemies at the end. I think you could probably get away with this if you reduced the maximum number of shots that group together from 4 to 3. The 4-in-a-rows always buggered things up for me.

Hmmm, that's all I can come up with at the moment. I'll have another play through tomorrow and see if anything else strikes me.

Bugs!

• The vertical platform section with the troopers has a bug near the top, as shown in the video.
• Pushing up against the left wall beneath the entrance to level 6 causes some strangeness. You can see this in the playthrough video, where I get warped into the tunnel with the red blocks.

I can do some proper testing on all of the platforms if you want, to find any more bugs like this.

Cute 'em up

This would be a horizontal shoot-em-up, not a platformer. Since shoot-em-ups are usually set in mechanical/space worlds I thought I'd do the opposite and have a super cartooney style instead.

This is so sweet. And you're right, there do need to be more cute shooters. Like Pop 'n' Twinbee!

Also, my sorry excuse for a megaman art.

Incorrect. That is awesome.

FL Studio is great until you want to change time signatures in the middle of a song. I haven't really used much else so I don't have much to compare to though.

You can actually change the time signature of individual patterns (Although positioning these on the Playlist will be a little trickier than usual, but not impossible), to a point. At the top left of the Step Sequencer is a box that usually reads '--'; you can drag on this to change the number beats per bar for the current pattern. You can't change the number of divisions per beat, however, so you can't go from 4/4 to 4/3. Except, you sort of can, with a bit of a fudge. If you set the time signature for the project to 16/1 (The equivalent of 4/4), you can then change individual patterns to 12/1 (The equivalent of 4/3). You'll most likely have to automate a tempo change to keep the same number of beats per bar, however (Oh, and because you've got 4 times as many beats, you'll have to crank the project tempo up to 4 times what it would have been otherwise).

Whew!

big pic
I've started way more but most never even got far enough to be distinguishable from one another since they were all mostly just boxes and squares by the time I gave up. And the oldest ones are on my long-dead computer.

The second from the top on the far right looks interesting. And I like the chunky pixels of the screenshot two pictures from the left of that. Is that an Amstrad CPC colour palette?

Sweeeet tree.

Sweeeet trees.

I'm more impressed by Army Moves and Elf! I used to play those games when I was 12! And Gazza II! I take it you've met David Whittaker?

This is great! And vaguely accurate, too; Based on the track 'Vacuum Garden' from his 'Hello Everything' LP, Squarepusher released a limited edition EP called 'Vacuum Tracks', which is about 20 minutes of droning noise, much like that made by a vacuum cleaner.