critique wanted Looking for help on my NES pony sprite

[Toastypk 920]

I've decided I would work some more on my Pony Final Fantasy 1 NES Rom hack.

The thing that's going to be the most trouble for me is undoubtedly going to be the sprites. I'm not asking anyone to make sprites for me, but even though I'm a really bad spriter, I decided to do these myself, with so-so results.

For techincal reasons I won't get into, I have palette limitations bewteen all six characters, so I made them all share black and white colors, and they all get their own third color.

Here is my Twilight Sparkle overworld sprite. Original size and 4x.

I was wondering if anyone had any tweaks or improvements for this. Remember, I can only use white, lavender, and black. Magenta is transparent.

 

[Splashee 28,537]

Considering all the limitations, you have done a good job!

When working with sprites, try turning on some of the TV filters in an emulator to get a feel how some pixels merge or blur together, and try to tweak them to look better there. Many sprites were done on real CRT monitors/TVs back in the day.

You will most likely see transparency between certain colors of close by pixels. Fixing by changing color of one of the pixels can actually improve the sprite in a magic way, later when seen in real pixels.

[ExplosionMare 18,007]

I noticed on her side that her hooves aren’t visible. If you want to add that while keeping within the space, you could have the wings folded or hidden behind the hooves.

Edit: I see them now but I think adding a few extra black pixels would make it more visible

Edited March 20, 2021 by ExplosionMare

[Toastypk 920]

4 hours ago, ExplosionMare said:

I noticed on her side that her hooves aren’t visible. If you want to add that while keeping within the space, you could have the wings folded or hidden behind the hooves.

Edit: I see them now but I think adding a few extra black pixels would make it more visible

Do you mean her "hands" hooves or "feet" hooves?

[ExplosionMare 18,007]

11 hours ago, Toastypk said:

Do you mean her "hands" hooves or "feet" hooves?

Hand hooves

[Toastypk 920]

I've finished another sprite, which I'm similarly looking for help with.

There are a variety of shopkeepers, they are 16x32 pixels apiece.

The weapon shop guy, I've decided to turn him into one of the pegasus royal guards. (The armor guy will be the dark-coated unicorn guard.)

This is a little more complex than a map sprite, you think this is ok looking? Anything to tweak? I have a couple of variations with different hand-hoof placement.

Edited April 11, 2021 by Toastypk

[Toastypk 920]

As I'm making more and more sprites for my Pony Fantasy 1 game, I'm finding I'm getting somewhat better. I have to base sprites on existing artwork that i shrink small and model a sprite on top of, but it works. For instance, I recently did a pretty good sprite of a character I'm placing as an optional superboss, which I'll put behind a spoiler-

Spoiler

 

Tempest! Is good?

 

Well I'm curious for some critique again. This time I'm making a changeling. I based it off this vector.

However, the NES doesn't produce a gray that dark, so what I did was took the darkest gray I could get, and made an outline for the changeling, using the background black as his "main" color.

I like it, but I'm wondering what you all think, can it be better?