Go lower resolution. You seem to use quite high resolution sprites and the higher the resolution the more raw art talent you actually need.

I have the same issue. I sometimes try to get around it by making minimalistic style games. You would be surprised at what you can create with simple geometric shapes.

Testing name change…sorry

And the tips above are true as well. Joshua is especially right: you can animate via code, use motion design techniques in a sense, more so than focus on asset production. Tweens and particles are powerful tools to improve both your game’s visuals and its feel.

It feels like terrible advice, but it’s actually the best advice: just do it.

draw something bad

see that it is bad

fix it

repeat until you’re happy with it

Technique is half as important as practice.

As a programmer trying to art as well, one thing I would say is try to pick a style and stick to it. Pick one or two colors e.g. Red and purple and then make EVERYTHING in your game be pretty much shades of these colors. Sometimes your individual sprites can be fine but if the style is not cohesive then it looks bad.

I’ve been doing pixel art for a long ass time and most of my games end up looking like something out of the Saturn/PS1 2D game era rather than the overly-retro 8-bit stuff I see most of the time. That said, for a person with no arting experience I’d say the simplest way to create effective yet not complex and quite quick art is doing 2 particular things. Keep your art made up of symbols rather than details and work with a good palette. This might need some explaining. Doing symbols instead of details is basically stripping away the thing you’re drawing to the most essential components. Basically simplifying things as much as possible until you have just enough for the drawing to be recognisable. It’s no longer the thing you’re drawing but your brain still sees it as such (thus, symbolizing the object). For example eyes are a very complex to draw detailed but doing just two circles that are of a different color than the face can be just as effective. Speaking of different colors the palette is also very important. A general rule of thumb is the more limited it is, the easier it is to work with. However, the choice of colors becomes much more important. I’d say look into some basic color theory for more details, but in layman’s terms having 1-3 shades of a certain color is a good route to go. 1 if you want to go super simple and abstract, 2 if you want some shadows for each color and 3 if you feel the need for highlights as well. In conclusion, keeping things as simple as possible once again prooves useful for LD. If you have any questions in particular go ahead and ask, and I shall try to answer.

When learning to create art, as with many other things, it’s good to separate technique from creativity so that you aren’t trying to come up with what to draw while you are learning to draw. For some practice, try to copy some existing art that you like (just for practice though, never use copies of someone else’s work for your games or otherwise pass it off directly as your own).