Story time:
As you probably already know, I'm spending a good bit of my dev time on helping a friend of mine make a multiplayer game together. Recently he asked of me to organize a brand new sprite sheet for our character and I spent some time talking to people in the genre and asking them what they think. After awhile I found somebody who was dissatisfied with where we were (we are pretty secretive so it's not really their fault), and they had a good few ideas for us.
One of the first things they suggested was a brand new avatar, and honestly I agreed whole-heatedly. I got used to seeing this player so it wasn't as bad for me, but seeing from a new perspective I didn't like how the face blended so much on the sides and my friend also brought up how bad the outline was for emojis and similar.
I actually ended up reaching out to another pixel artist friend of mine by the name of Star, and he made a beautiful mock-up player for us which we used as reference to freshen up our current avatar and spice it up a little. I really like how it came out and I hope you guys find it appealing as well.
Here are the designs in gif form.
