Thanks a lot for your interest! Some others on reddit have contacted me, but I'm going to keep searching for more people to meet up. There MUST be more this area. I'm not sure how to find them exactly, but someone suggested I try the IGDA. I'll give that a go.

If any of you live in Baltimore, and are into the art/live music scenes, you probably know of The Windup Space. Well, my friend owns it, and we talked about hosting some indie-game events there. He's really into the idea of dedicating a Saturday to indie developers showing off what they're working on, giving talks on how they did it, etc... I was very happy he was into the idea, but I realized quickly that I don't know other indie developers in Baltimore. I know BMcC lives here, and I was hoping he'd be able to let me know about some local developers, but he doesn't use the online things I do that much, so he hasn't gotten my message.

So, I want to ask, do you live in/near Baltimore? Would you be interested in something like this? People would be able to play your games, and we'd share info with each other. Maybe meet some people who could fill gaps in your team.

The second thing is that Impossible Studios has closed. This is another in a string of layoffs Baltimore has experienced in the past year. Austin, Texas has also experienced something similar, and have thrown together something called Nation of Indies (more info here). Now, they got this all together from an idea to a reality in 48 hours to help out these developers in a difficult time. I'd love to have the same thing for Baltimore developers, but I'd need others to help.

Please get in touch with me if any of this sounds interesting. My name is Dave Freeman, and I'm segadult at that well-known google mail provider. Thanks!

I use GIMP, but that's what I'm most familiar with. Still, for versatility, I haven't found a program that trumps it--which is why I actually prefer it over Photoshop. People call me crazy for that.

My favorite features are the ability to actively test animation. If you have all your sprite's organized in a sequence of layer groups for each frame, you can edit pieces inside that group, make certain ones visible or not, and when you go to animation playback it will reflect that.

In case you weren't aware, since it seems you imply you were not, Photoshop does this. Photoshop has a lot of flexibility in this too, like remembering the location of each layer in a frame, allowing you to move pieces of images in an animation without affecting their original arrangement.

Is anyone else getting blocked from this thread by Chrome with claims of malware?

Nice. Reminds me of this.

Someone else on this board was saying good things about Aseprite.

UPDATE:
I've been using Aseprite for a while now, and it's now my preferred pixel animation program. I love the onion skinning, and I can work with it pretty quickly. I still miss some of the tile creation features of Pickle, but it's possible I'm just missing similar features in Aseprite.

As pointed out by several folks, the chest heaving was just too much. So he is now a belly-breather. Hopefully this read a bit better. I'm finally getting these in game, and I'm pretty happy with the results so far.

Looks great! You can probably smooth it out slightly more by using the gray you use for antialiasing on his shirt to lead into the downward motion. Really good work. I'm jealous of your stuff.

did this a while ago, I'll may make a game out of this...I don't know, feel inspired :D

Beautiful. What kind of game would it be?

I've heard good things about Pickle. It was made for Flixel, but can work for general pixeling purposes. It handles animation and has excellent features for tiles. I haven't used it myself (I just found out about it today) so I'm not sure what down sides it has.

A princess that's ready for adventure.

Beautiful work!

I think I'm the only one that understood what was going on in the animation.

Oh shit... you just made me realize he's attacking to the left. Not the right. I've been having trouble this whole time.

I just want to add that according to my experimentation yesterday, Unity will mess up your pixel art if you don't give it a texture that's already a power of 2, even if you click on the option telling it NOT to resize it. It's doing something under the hood regardless. It might not be apparent on some art, but it was pretty apparent on my 4 color low resolution NES art.

I actually learned a lot from my work over the weekend about making an accurate looking 8bit game in Unity. I'm not sure if this is the thread to share it, as it seems to be about a couple of specific questions.

I live in Baltimore and would love to JAM.

Beautiful work. If you want to work on color/contrast of the Bison (which it seems that you've tried to do from what you say), another possibility is putting some darker objects behind the Bison. Trees and bushes are dark in those photos too. Also, raising the contrast of the wolves might help.

For me, the contrast is more about art style than color. The wolves and bison are both beautiful, but the wolves are definitely more simplistic in both shading and shape. But as Snake Chair mentioned, it can be appealing in its own way. It's up to you since this is your learning exercise.

Thats looks pretty nice! Colors are pretty and i like that simplistic style..

I like the colours and the style (Frankenstein's monster especially)

Your sprites are cool by the way.

Thanks a lot guys! I might post back here soon when I get into backgrounds, which will be pretty bad. Not my strong suit.

We forgive you on the sole basis of the "mega drive" (genesis) avatar, thx for my childhood!

hee hee, that ain't my avatar. It's my LEVEL.