Thanks! I won't be as active until next year but then I'll surely start posting on my deviantart the revamped story!

Thank you very much, have a merry Christmas as well! :D

Sorry for the late reply, it was late in the evening when I remembered to check my inbox.

Emphasizing the protagonist is important but not constantly needed. With one light color and one dark color, the design helps itself in most backgrounds. Again, the player just needs to know where their character is on the screen.

You can keep vivid buildings as long as they're distinct from the protagonist and other objects/characters. Earthbound 3 has vivid buildings as well, but the characters have black lines around them so they don't blend into the background.

The robots can still have noticeable colors but do avoid using colors that can be confused as the protagonist's. You can still use blue for example, but you could resort to a more purple-ish blue or a less saturated blue.  Just remember light, saturation and color can be helpful in indicating what's important in a scene. Like how pokeballs with items in them are vivid red even in a cave.

And the caves' ground would benefit from some kind of seamless, non-intrusive pattern to become more interesting.

I used to draw with paint net as well but nowadays there are more art programs available.
I now use paint tool sai 2. I selected anything other than the protagonist, rocks and tent, and applied a layer set to "Color" with brown over the selected part.
I recommend firealpaca, or even Krita for a free alternative if your computer can handle it, in mine it's a bit slow but gets the job done.

I'm off to sleep for now, I'm on a different time zone but feel free to leave a reply whenever you want.
I don't often check itch io but I do have a deviantart account with the same name, but without the exclamation point in this username.

I think the ground could have more going on and more contrasts with the little rocks and plants. the tent and the protagonist's hair seem too vivid compared to the background.

The background also could use a single tone of color to bring more focus to the protagonist.

I tried to represent what I was saying but you might have a different opinion on how to handle these subjects.

Stardew Valley has nice cave designs you could use as inspiration:

I know some art stuff that could easily be adapted to a pixel art context.

-Color is important, make the protagonist recognizable with a small, vivid but not too vibrant, color scheme. Think about it. "Castlevania", "Shantae", "shovel Knight", "Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight", these four use protagonists with two or three distinguishable sets of color. Coordinate your backgrounds and enemies with your protagonist's design.

No one likes to play a game with blue backgrounds, blue enemies and a blue protagonist. Players want to know where their character is on the screen without actively having to search for them.

-Pixel art's not about correctly representing objects, it's about conveying them, keep that in mind. With two brown pixels and a pink pixel you can convey an open mouth, etc. Or not even open the mouths at all, people will still understand the character is talking.

-Don't overdo shading and don't resort to "pillow shading",  search the term online for more info. It doesn't look appealing. Simple shading and some knowledge of color temperature is always nice.

-Be conscient of the resolution you're using, I didn't use proper resolutions when making a test pixel art game and the result was, when scaled up, everything was twitching and vibrating when the camera moved. The software was trying to stretch every vertical line of one pixel to a pixel and a third basically.

"Momodora: reverie under the moonlight" is a solid game to use as reference on what feels right. The protagonist has a black shirt and white outfit to compensate for both dark and light backgrounds and the controls are comfortable even though the game might be hard at times.
"Iconoclasts" also has fun mechanics and nice character and boss design.

"Shantae and the Pirate's Curse" also looks nice, look up gameplay for these and study them for a few moments, maybe even speedruns of them to see later elements and levels of the games quickly.

Good luck!

Yeah, I had the idea for the comedic dialogue but I imagined it better as a small panel with the conversation all gathered up in the same space.

I haven't done much pixel art, last one I did was in 2016 and was quite simple:
https://www.deviantart.com/aquapaulo/art/Cave-Baroness-Pixel-art-625139869

Thanks for confirming some of my doubts. In the extended version of this comic I'm making, the text is a tad bigger and there's less dialogue, separated in speech bubbles. Some rough parts are still visible but it'll get better.

The plot in the first chapters'll be light on action and more focused on comedy, but it would set up opportunities for future action-themed chapters.

Thank you very much for the feedback!

Recently I posted a small 8-10 page comic named "Protect the Atlas"

that you can see  either here on itch or start reading here on DA !

here's a page sample:

It didn't get that many views and one download, so I wasn't able to get any feedback.

But I was hoping someone could have a look and share their thoughts :D  I wanna keep working on the comic but I wanted to know what more could be fixed.

you can use the Blender addon Animall to make simple animations like water flow. There are a couple youtube tutorials online for simple animations, although this method requires quite some tweaking in the graph editor to set it to "linear".

you could also set the tweening to "constant" instead of "linear" and make it sudden, for stuff like blinking lights or opening/closing mouths.

Thank you for considering! I understand coming up with a concept is way easier than its execution.

Indeed, being able to edit it in blender would reduce the back-and-forth between blender and the art software.

Hi! I'd like to post a couple suggestions and one question:

Paint selected meshes

Sometimes I plan to paint a pattern or group of individual tiles (like a face for example) in an irregular mesh that contains several bits I have to paint one by one. I think it would be faster if I could select several meshes and fill them with that pattern.

Texture-painting over the image

I understand  Sprytile is mainly pixel-art-based and how the software uses its textures by assigning the mesh to its respective tile, therefore it's inevitable that painting over the tile changes all tiles. However I like using Sprytile as a base for my textures and would love a shortcut for implementing a second layer of textures so I could draw more in detail over the texture.

High-res image painting

Again, yes it's pixel-based. but this kind of texture-painting would be great to use when painting textures on a different piece of software, then directly applying the texture onto the model.

 In my opinion, these last three would be of tremendous help both in tileset and non-tileset texture painting. Thank you very much for reading, I use the software all the time!