@SolarLune
Thank you very much for the criticism and compliments! I'll try and see what I can do with the animation and see how it looks with the arm moving out. And I've been working on some new tiles lately, so I'll keep this in mind, though I have found myself using a lot of darker, more saturated colors in areas lately.
@Kazuyo
Thank you for the critical tip! Your image really helped illustrate the concept you were explaining about making the foreground characters pop out from the background. While I probably won't go that extreme in coloring and styling, I have considered in the past upping the saturation of the characters slightly to make them pop out noticeably more without them looking noticeably different, and will probably do so now that I know that could really help.
@geepit
Thanks for the compliments and criticism! I'm honestly surprised I used only one hue for all those colors, since I often avoid doing that. Then again, it is a little old, so my habits and techniques probably changed since then. The modified image looks good, and the character coloring looks very nice while it's using fewer, slightly more saturated colors and really helps define the style a bit more by using less complex shading. I'll really be considering trying these colors out or finding other saturated colors that'll work, and maybe even see how it looks with the spinning animations.
I've also been working on tiles a lot lately, but the only tiles I've gotten done that I feel okay with so far are these water tiles:
4x2 (16x16) tiles
(the grass at the bottom might be changed to have simpler coloring, and I've made several different grass designs already, most of them simple and one color per blade with two colors total, but it looked too much like it should be moving and/or interactive, and there were a lot of empty gaps to allow them to not all be going just straight up and that made it feel a little awkward in itself)
I'll probably make it darker or transparent with a background to match it up with an environment, though.
I'm still trying to make some grass/dirt/ground tiles, but I keep thinking that it really isn't matching the style or that there's too much dirt or too much grass or some other excuse. I've been considering maybe figuring out a new way of designing grass tiles that's different from any that I've seen before, but I keep thinking that that's not where I need to be going with this and that it may just be a bit of an issue with coloring and that I've come across usable structures/designs for it in the past (be it mine or seen somewhere else). I might post some of the ones I've made, but I barely have any of the rejects saved, and the ones I do I saved in case I wanted to use them for other projects in the future or something. For now, I'll try figuring out what other tiles I can use that I might be able to get designed now.
The game's taking place in a large, open forested area with swamps and trees and caves and a mountain and all sorts of cool stuff, since I was much more interested in making that kind of an environment and have many ideas to make it neat and atmospheric.