Heres a mockup showing some updated artwork.
-Updated character design (gave him some armour).
-Improved tileset colours.
-Made a better background (2 layer parallax)
-Added dummy ui elements (player lives, coins, pause)
The UI elements are just static sprites at this point to see if it looks any good. I havent set up the events for the player health or currency system.
I think the character looks better with armour... Im not sure if I want to make the armour up-gradable because it will be be tricky managing animations for different sets of armour. Im still thinking about what to do there...