I updated the main thread with the assistant designs, I think it can be a pretty nice touch to add to the dog hero but I can't find her a non cliché place to the human one.

The environment looks really nice. The palette also makes the character read well.

Thanks a lot for that comment really. Environmental art is not exactly my strong point as an artist and I'm working really hard to make it work nicely  . As for the palette what I did was use way more saturated color for the main characters and more dull stuff for the platforms and terrain you collide with, that certainly did the tric!

I'll definitively keep an eye on this, really nice concept and origin. The only thing that concerns me a bit is, being it an rpg game, won't it be a bit confusing navigating through dungeons and relatively "big" towns covering so little vision area?

Looks great so far! The main character looks slightly generic for my taste but the art style and animation used is great and fitting. The environmental art is magnificent.

Are you planning to add multiplayer and coop-like combo elements (ala river city ranson)?

I like the simplistic yet very very effective graphic setting. Do you have any mechaninc in mind beside the general interaction like breaking objects that you already have?

Looks pretty darn nice. Will there be online mode or only local?

By the way I'm using ScreenToGif to capture my gifs, although I just tried capturing pixel art stuff it seems to work nice if you set it up to maximum quality.

[Update 3]

Thanks for the comments guys! Hopefully it will look more and more like garbage  . Also...

Update 3

We've got new animations to make the character break and reconstruct! check out how it is looking:

Aaaand here's a funny debug feature that unfortunately won't be available in the final version, but it is too funny not to post!

So bug, many broken

Games like this make me restore faith in humanity. It somehow takes me back to my arcade childhood, instant classic!

[Update 2]

Update 2

Serious banana and patrol skull now enjoys a good dose of parallax.

I'm not entirely convinced with the last parallax layer, I might redo it when we start polishing stuff and testing maps.

Thanks guys! So many opinions and answers...

@Mittens If dog is the final character I'll try to make it a labrador in cutscenes. The day I can make 10x6 pixels (or so) seem exactly like a labrador I will be consider myself an accomplished pixel artist.

@bombjack It's definitively tempting, I'll keep it in mind most likely for future projects.

@Ananda.C and Drof The character is a powerful person in its environment. He is a trashomancer and although he is the main character you'll never see him your main character creator room where he makes trash minions (the ones you actually control). Red seems good for an eye catching powerful character but this dude is also pretty lazy as he never takes matters into his own hands even though he is an accomplished magician-sortof. Most likely the mood in the character selection screen will be a dark-ish lab, with some wacky elements here and there as you'll see your possible characters created from piles of trash.

@diegzumillo True stuff that he was kind of jrpg-like, it was intended as a possible look but I think every dark haired or dog combination looks better. These are the first comments pro-dogface I'm getting so my imagination is kinda flying at the moment XD.

Based on your comments I'll also think about adding a possible "secretary" that actually gets the job done and scolds the mc but that only seems like a good choice for dog faces. It seems to me that dog face exalts the lazy aspect of the character while human face exalts his power, so evil secretary seems to go better with the dog face. I'll update with lil' concepts when I get some extra time to do them 

Thanks a bunch guys! Updates will come soon.

Have you made an eraser brush in the same way? I ended up using a lot of white for clearing stuff up

Thanks for the suggestions guys, here's the same image without the white dot:

It makes them look less naziesuqe and also it makes the sprite less noisy so is quite better overall. I couldn't get any colour for the band that I liked in the non red dressed ones though (beside red of course). So most likely red human will win 

This works nice with indexing colours also. Sometimes when illustrating I feel that the hard brush in photoshop is not enough and I end up doing a lot of color level adjusting stuff, this thing really does the trick! thanks a lot for sharing!

Edit -- I did an illustration using this brush and then tried to get rid of unnecesary colors manually. It turned out that last part was really tedious and didn't find any way to do it quickly without manual editing so It's not the pinacle of colour reduction xD, check it out:

[Update 02/sep/2015:]

Hello guys!
We are currently trying to decide which of these designs will become the main character of our upcoming game, Trashomancer:

Right now the red suited human is winning, what do you guys think? Dog faced ones are a bit less expressive.

Update 02/sep/2015:
I've tried adding an assistant to the dog hero that is the one who actually makes him move his butt and make him create minions:

Oh, she also takes him for a walk sometimes

Dog hero seems to be winning some points, I'll make some portraits and update this very soon again to have some more perspective into which character we end up with 

My brain is officially dead, nice twist to puzzle platforming gameplay!
It's normal to get radically different opinions from people, sometimes you just have to trust yourself and even out the opinions of everyone you ask I guess 

[Update 1 - Tiled maps working and water system]

Update 1 - Tiled maps working and water system

We got tiled maps up and running and we did a nice water system, check these out!

Also... serious banana:

Thanks a lot pal, glad you like it! We spent a lot of time designing and making that generator so it does not look terribly bad with some combinations. Soon I'll post more gifs with different combinations in movement 

Still working on the cavern enviroment but things are going nicely. Here's a mock up so you can see how it is coming:

Everything will be tested on tiled soon, as well as a water system that is also being worked on 

When I saw your living apple main character I had a good laugh since it looked just as absurd XD. I guess apples has that something.

By the way, I started testing up some tiles tuff. I'm starting with a cavern environment because it seems easy to do, stay tuned!

Not for a pc release indeed. For that you would need way more variety in hazards and stuff in each environment, it all depends on the variety you manage to get. If you have a lot of variety it's cool to have 100/150 lvls, but if you have a little more variety than you have now the game would feel repetitive with that many levels.