The VG Resource

Considering this is PBG we're talking about... his face could be a bit goofier.

To add onto what Kelvin said, I would also recommend making his face thinner. The face you made looks very round whereas PBG's face is pretty narrow.

I made the head thinner, but since this is a neutral face, and there will be separate ones for different emotions, I wasn't sure how to make this goofier, but still neutral.

The cheeks still seemed kind of thin. I think I may have made it worse, though. I'm not good with human faces. :/

Is this better?

Yes. The head looks more round.

I tried to rework the tiles a bit.

Okay, I'm really out of ideas. I can't seem to find a good pattern for the dirt. Any ideas?

Maybe you could try doing what Metroid Zero Mission does and have a texture that fades into a dark color? It looks good because you couldn't really see deep into rock and dirt and such from a character's perspective, so it makes it seem more solid and impassible that way, and the solid color, if picked right, isn't hard to look at for a long time. Repeating patterns could cause eye strain, especially if they're high-contrast.

http://www.spriters-resource.com/search/?q=tiles <- A good place to go for ideas.

Here are two ideas!



On the top is a more realistic texture (a la Spelunky) and on the bottom is cartoonier texture, which I imagine is what you're going for. My general process for drawing dirt tiles goes like this...Start with the dark shade, add a solid 1-color texture, shade that texture, apply it to the tiles, then darken the edges to give a bevelled look like in New Super Mario Bros. It's not the most organic-looking texture, but it's a quick method that's easy to learn. You might also want to go in and break up the outlines of your grass tiles. Having the edges be a perfect square doesn't look very natural.

So I tried to emulate something close to your NSMB like one, and made it seem like the dirt pattern is sticking out.

That looks good, although I think you should have left the detail on the grass visible on the sides where the colors get darker. It looks a bit odd how the detail suddenly vanishes, just lowering the darkness of the green on the edges where it turns dark a bit would work well if you ask me.

There!

So, a couple of effects that I'm not sure if they should be for collisions, or explosions. (Sorry about no GIFs, because freaking iPods)

Kind of looks like an impact to me, maybe for a bullet. You could probably add a couple pixels to the corners of the pieces on the large one so they keep a somewhat circular shape as they go out.