E-Man's Sprite R & D

[StarSock64]

I was taking a peek at your color values and noticed that all your shades seem to be at the highest saturation setting. I'm pretty sure that in general, shades in the shadows should have less saturation than shades in the light (aka lower saturation on dark shades, keep some higher saturation on bright shades)

I think I heard somewhere that highlights should have less saturation than the base color, but I don't know if that's true. I'm not really well-versed in how shading works...

Anyway, I think some of the best advice I can give you is to take a bunch of random official game sprites you like (probably more modern games; some SNES games and such contain bad habits)

then pick the eyedrop tool for lots of different shades within the sprite,
and look at all the hue, sat, lum, rgb values in detail. The visual representation on ms paint is probably easier to comprehend than looking at the numbers, but you should probably kinda keep an eye on both to see what affects the numbers.
Basically look at this thing:


then try to get a feel for how the professionals pick their colors and what kind of trends there are in their decisions