You also should do some tests with color mode, which way is better for the game feel. For example, you could tone sunrise in pink and sunset in orange, all that first-year art school tricks with the palette.
I would like to elaborate 8x8 thing, I use the 16x16 cursor now, and it is not helping sprite-count-wise, but I had the least frustration with triangle-ish 16x16 cursor. Not sure if hovering works this way, but you also could change the form of the cursor context-wise