It's nice to see the art steadily improving but it might be time to start hiring real pixel artists.
For the 16-bit level that they're aiming for, I thought the PA games looked pretty good. What improvements would they have to make for them to be considered 'real' pixel artists?
I'd prefer not to make this an argument about what is "real" pixel art and what isn't. I'll just say that Zeboyd is a 2 person team, and we do well enough to keep making games as we are. I do all of the visual stuff, detail the character designs, and construct the game worlds. We've been able to make all of our games up to this point in a reasonable amount of time, but we can't expand yet. Art is subjective so all I can promise you is that I'll keep doing my best to improve. If starting at one point and constantly striving to improve means that I'm not a "real" pixel artist, then all I can say is good luck to any other artist out there trying to become "real" at what they do.
Otherwise all I can say is that I appreciate that people do, in fact, care enough to comment on our games, even if it's in some hope that we do better. Personally I try to be my own critic, and find ways to improve my own personal quality but with a heavy emphasis on efficiency. That's a philosophy that we've been running with at Zeboyd since we started, and increasing overhead and costs too quickly often causes indie teams to collapse under their own weight.