Hi, I am making a 2D top-down/side-view mixed game.

I am by no means an artist and am quite happy with my graphics, but I feel it lacks atmosphere, perhaps there is low contrast between things, maybe background should be less colorful and characters more.

Please tell me what you think should be improved. Thank you.

A thin lighter edge to simulate Fresnel is the only thing I can think of.

Like the style.

I would recommend having the camera phone in closer to the player sprite so that less of the area is visible at any given time (Like in the GIF you posted). I can't help but feel like knowing too much about the scene before actually exploring it might ruin the atmosphere. As for colors, I'm not so sure since I don't know what kind of feel you're going for. But for someone who isn't an artist (I can relate) you've done a great job so far.

I really like your style, still I have two thoughts:

1. technically you should change the light effect, it does not match the quality of the rest. (Play around with fading at the edge, adding a yellow touch, playing around with blending modes, using two decals (additive+blend ?) ).

2. Try to make your character more prominent. He is visual appealing and blends nicely in the background, but once you start playing your game, he and other NPCs might not get enough focus.

Hi. I think it's difficult to visually read the structure of the environment.

There are some things you can do to help with this:
- Lower the contrast and tiling of the ground texture so it doesn't align with the walls (in some places it does and it's confusing). This way you will see it as two distinct regions.
- Use artificial lighting to help with defining wall faces and the top part of walls.

Wow I didn't expect so many and useful replies. Thank you guys.

I did the fresnel thing and it really brings the characters out from the background. I made it only on the edge pixels, and as the game is 2x scaled, it is kind of sub-pixely. I like it though, because the player sprite is so small, the full 2x size bright pixels would brighten half the character.

For the lights, they are my number one enemy. I would really like to make them smoother and bigger, but then the player could place more of them next to each-other and it would make a really bad bright effect. That could be dealt with by using separate Grabpass for each light, but then the player could place many lights on the screen and destroy the performance. The lights have shader which brightens colors only under some threshold, which prevents them from blinding people during the day. There should be a better way to do this, but I'd have to redo everything concerning lights and ambient light.

The wooden floor tiling didn't even occur to me, will redo. The wall top sides really look better color-separated from the rest, shame I will have to use more colors.

EDIT: Oh, forgot about the visible area concerns.

So, I agree it looks and feels better when smaller area is shown, but the problem is how to implement it? Now the sprites are fixed size - 2x the size of the screen pixels. I could zoom in more depending on screen size, but I'm afraid it would look really bad to have 5*zoomed pixels on fullHD screen. My animations are not good enough to look nice close-up. Also there is spell-fighting and the spells can fly quite fast, so reducing player's view could have negative effects. Guess I'll have to experiment.

It still looks like programmer graphics, hiring an artist Will bring another level of quality if you plan to make a commercial game.
Currently the colors and shapes arent very appealing to the eye.

Although I hope to make some pocket money on this, I want to make everything myself, as it is a great learning experience.