Given that you're working at such a small scale, I think you've made these too noisy. The character sprites in Cave Story tend to use big blocks of solid colour to suggest detail, while you've got lots of fiddly bits here, especially on the faces.
Something to pay attention to with characters in Cave Story is that they're pretty spefically designed to match the style; body parts that are likely to overlap or are close together are usually strongly contrasting colours, to make poses more readable despite their small size and minimal detail. (THIS IS NO ACCIDENT. I guarantee that the guy who made the game designed the characters with this in mind)
![[Image: quote_cave_story_bigger.png]](http://a1.twimg.com/profile_images/508197673/quote_cave_story_bigger.png)
Hopefully you can see what I mean here. His arms are very close to his chest, so you'll notice they're almost complete opposite values; his arms are very very pale and his chest is very very dark. This means that even at 1x size, it's still fairly easy to read the pose. His legs are a bright primary colour which is more of a middle value, and again, stands out very starkly against the black of his shirt.
Using really strongly contrasting colours makes it much easier to read low-detail or small sprites.
Sonic characters don't lend themselves especially well to this style because most of their bodies are the same colour throughout -- I think you might be biting off more than you can chew. The closest I can find is the stuff from Sonic Pocket Adventure, but those sprites make pretty heavy use of black outlines to differentiate between bodyparts, so I'm not sure you could get much out of them that you could actually apply to these sprites.
Also I've said (a lot) that spriting isn't really my scene so maybe I'm not in the best position to comment
but would it be too much to see some more original work posted instead of "Here are dudes from one game as if they were in another game"?
Something to pay attention to with characters in Cave Story is that they're pretty spefically designed to match the style; body parts that are likely to overlap or are close together are usually strongly contrasting colours, to make poses more readable despite their small size and minimal detail. (THIS IS NO ACCIDENT. I guarantee that the guy who made the game designed the characters with this in mind)
Hopefully you can see what I mean here. His arms are very close to his chest, so you'll notice they're almost complete opposite values; his arms are very very pale and his chest is very very dark. This means that even at 1x size, it's still fairly easy to read the pose. His legs are a bright primary colour which is more of a middle value, and again, stands out very starkly against the black of his shirt.
Using really strongly contrasting colours makes it much easier to read low-detail or small sprites.
Sonic characters don't lend themselves especially well to this style because most of their bodies are the same colour throughout -- I think you might be biting off more than you can chew. The closest I can find is the stuff from Sonic Pocket Adventure, but those sprites make pretty heavy use of black outlines to differentiate between bodyparts, so I'm not sure you could get much out of them that you could actually apply to these sprites.
Also I've said (a lot) that spriting isn't really my scene so maybe I'm not in the best position to comment
but would it be too much to see some more original work posted instead of "Here are dudes from one game as if they were in another game"?
![[Image: 6WzBw.gif]](http://i.imgur.com/6WzBw.gif)