Hi, CL over looong time!
I've managed to land myself into a bit of trouble. In July last year, I released a puzzle game named Pall. It was a logic game, roughly based on Laser Light (MS-DOS).
It looked like this:

As you can see, there's some stuff going on, but it isn't very clear if it's any fun or what's going on at all. Now see the trailer:
Website for further interest
Trailer, despite breaking YouTube 15-second immersion rule, shows what goes on much better. It shows that everything's much more alive and animated than screenshots would suggest, that background uses parallax movement and so on. Sadly, despite being on every imaginable platform except iOS, Pall was absolute flop. I had 7000 players, and 6940 of them chinese pirates. While most of the problems lie in lack of (and inability to do) marketing (keywords Android + Puzzle fires all spam filters for every journalist, screenshots look boring) and my blue-eyed belief that "if there's a quality product, people are willing to pay for it" (they do
not on mobile market!), I'm also not satisfied with graphic style, hence this thread.
I'm still not done with Pall. A sequel is almost done, but I want to lose the pixellated, lifeless retro look and actually make use of color wheels and theory, and make it look fresher.
While I originally liked my art direction of first game very much - and was close to taking it even further and make everything in glorious 4-color cyan-purple-black-white CGA, audience did not like even current look (from as little feedback as I got).
So, as title says, I need some
advice.
Ideas. Vision. I've been experimenting with barebone shapes and almost no colors (
See video), but on static screenshots it looks even more lifeless.
Generally, Pall isn't very complicated game. There's only 20-or-so setpieces that should have stylized, recognizable look.










Some of the game pieces. Sorry, glass corner isn't very visible due alpha.
What I need is a way to draw them in a way where they are still recognizable, but look significantly better. I also decided to up the size from original 48x48 to 96x96 pixels (or even 128x128), so I can add more detail and upscaling on various devices hurts less.
Does this make any sense?
Sorry for the wall of text, I've been thinking about this problem for months now while rewriting engine and I'm getting quite desperate