A background and some characters

[Akatosh]

So do I. I monkeyed (past tense of "to monkey", not monk-eyed) around with her and my original draft for a while, and this is what I came up with:


The biggest issue I can see with this is that people won't be able to play guess-the-gender with the characters anymore, but apart from that, I think she's LIGHT YEARS further up on the quality scale than the original sprite (not that hard, but still). I mainly stuck with the original shading (or lack) thereof, though.  I didn't like the varying line width around the boobs, but after removing them,



she started to look a bit TOO slutty (or, ahem, "surgically enhanced") to me, even for a femme fatale. Thanks for all the helpful suggestions, everybody... although this is kind of defeating my original intentions of having graphics that are mainly "easy to draw". 

Anyway... any further suggestions? I'd gladly take them.

[miguel]

I know what you mean, you would like a way to keep characters easy and quick to draw,
like a template sprite for each gender, and then you would just have to, say, add a moustache or hat, shoes, hair color or lenght.
I again advise you to look at SouthPark characters, they are poorly though stylish designed.
Your last character looks very good, btw, why don't you try to change dress colors and hair colors to see if you can make other convincing and charismatic characters?
I guess the more depth you put on a sprite the harder it gets to do all the views you want, it's the price one pays to have good characters
nice work

[OneDollar]

When I was doing the backgrounds for my game I used your games as one of the starting point for developing my own 'quick but still good looking' style. One of the changes I made was sticking shadows on everything - it keeps the cartoony look but adds more depth and interest to the scene. Other than that you could add more stuff in there to try and busy it up.

Anyway, here's the original:


And a quick edit: (paying very little attention to the light source etc)


And here's some shots from my game, if you're interested:
http://onedollarproductions.googlepages.com/Screen1.png
http://onedollarproductions.googlepages.com/Screen2.png
I used Flash for these (as InCreator suggested, I find this sort of thing a lot easier in vectors. You could checkout Inkscape -which is free-  if you don't want to download Flash.

You've already got a lot of good advice for characters, I'd suggest you consider how many are going to be in the game, and weigh up how much time it will take to draw them at that level and see if its worth it. You will get quicker though.

Hope some of that is worth considering.