Comments on: Legend of Equip > Pants (October Challenge)

By: digital_sorceress

digital_sorceress — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 12:52:18 +0000

I agree with what you say about the palette based sprites feeling more connected.

I dislike a lot of modern 2D sprites that are made from truecolour bitmaps. More often than not it looks like a montage of magazine cutouts. They often seem to feel like they don’t belong.

The palette size is also an interesting variable. If that number gets too big, the palette starts to feel like an approximation of RGB, and stops feeling like a palette. I think the threshold is somewhere in the order of 32 or 64 colours.

16 colours can feel a bit tight, although it was commonly used in older technology because with it we can neatly represent two pixels per byte. Or four bitplanes (four being a nice computer number).

32 colour makes for a more spacious palette : ( 9 hues + 1 grey ) * 3 shades + (black+white) = 32 colours … but it doesn’t work as tidily on a machine level (1.6 pixels per byte, or five bitplanes).

By: zachstronaut

zachstronaut — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 04:39:35 +0000

It *is* a very interesting thing! I agree. I basically created a radial rainbow gradient to capture all the hues, then I posterized to reduce the number of colors, and I did some hue shifting off of the “pure” red/green/blue. Now I had full saturation colors. I took those and moved the brightness up/down to create a light and dark variant (can also be done by overlaying semitransparent white/black). This creates the top 3 rows of color.

To create the bottom 3 rows of color, I took the rows from the top and desaturated them a bit so they had more grey in them.

I really like this technique as it gives you access to all the major colors you’d want (red, orange, yellow, yellow-green, green, blue-green, blue, etc etc).

Obviously, if you are trying to establish a particular mood with a game (such as night time, or a hot volcano) then one could shift all the colors a bit towards blue or red, for example.

Making a color palette more warm or more cool overall can go a long way to establishing a feel to a level of a game. I had a dungeon level for a prototype game the other day that was falling flat until I moved away from a pure gray palette to subtle warm grays instead. Went from artificial to earthen just like that.

I really have enjoyed doing my artwork in the confines of a particular set of colors. I find I work much faster, and the sprites feel like more connected and part of a set.

By: digital_sorceress

digital_sorceress — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 21:14:35 +0000

I like the colour palette you’ve created.

I’ve often felt that 10 hues+greys are just enough to cover all basic colours : red- orange- yellow- green- turquoise- skyblue- navyblue- purple- cerise. But I’m never sure what to do with saturation and value after that as I always seem to end up with too many similar shades around the green-blue parts of the palette.

Palette design is an interesting thing!