Whenever I approach another old 8-bit system I always try to make sprites of my OCs with its limitations and weird Apple II graphics were tempting to challenge myself with, so here's my old attempt to render Zed, Mark, Jack, Kit and Astro.
These are the weirdest sprites I ever made but there's no way to make it better at such resolution and especially with crazy Apple II graphics limiting me, there's so many strict rules for what shape should the pixels be depending on what colors surround them. For example, you can see weird lines going to the middle of Jack's chest from his orange nipples (the third guy) or the black line connecting Astro's nipples together (the fifth guy). Normally I'd do just orange dots on a blue body but I can't just put orange on blue in Apple II, it requires that awful padding of white or black between them, now imagine how hard it is to make something as detailed as a face at such small scale with those limitations! Still I'm feeling proud of how it turned out, the characters are still recognizable, each keeps its own personality, it could be even a bit better at larger size but the idea was to make the sprites as small as possible yet recognizable. And my reward for this is that I can make my characters look MASSIVE that way with their tiny limbs and heads making such a contrast with gargantuan body. Yeah, Zed and Mark's sprite heads were used in my later Apple II pixel art projects:
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/60070373/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/60083442/
I still may try to draw my characters at a bit larger scale since Apple II had games with pretty big sprites like Prince of Persia or Karateka and I'm curious to see how much more detail I can put at larger scale.