Problems

I'm facing this problem all over an over again: how to make decent-looking graphics? How to make them so glossy and eatable? My goal in this project is to learn to make it so awesome that I can proudly look back and see the progress. I want to learn something important in this project; I want to do a lot of work to make my graphics look good. Any tips and comments are welcomed. So, please, if you have any suggestions how to do make my graphics look better, I'd appreciate to hear your opinion.

Possible mascot for the game.

AppStore is full of really nice-looking games, like Fruit Ninja, Tiny Wings and Diamond Dash. I've played them and love the graphics. Those games, including many others, are going to influence my style a lot in this project.

Our project is going on for the second week and we have come up with a theme. The point in the game is to build 3 or more blocks of the same color. It's almost like tetris but the player drops only one block at a time. So the blocks have a tiny baby dragon trapped inside and the player's goal is to free as many as they can.

Some testing for the pixelz.

Dragon babies are trapped!

There was discussion about the images inside the block. They are too small compared to the amount of details they have and it doesn't look good on the iPhone screen. That's why I tried to take a lot of details off (compare the mascot picture above and the last one here). Also the pose of the character is hard to understand when you see only the small picture. It might not be so clear that it's trapped in there, even if in the bigger image it might be much clearer.
There will be 3-4 different colors and they probably won't be the standard red - yellow - blue - green. We want something a bit different.

My next steps will be iterating the character. I will also think about the background image which will stay darkish/natural colorish. That way it doesn't disturb the playing.