Tiger Sheep

I've been playing around with some miniboss designs. I'll introduce some of them once they're more fleshed out, but I ran into a serious choice about halfway through: I had to choose my palette, finally.

So far, we've been paletteless. Our engine supports all colors, but I found myself pining for the simplicity of a smaller colorset. I'm a big fan of self-imposing limitations on myself when I'm working on a project, because the simpler the toolset the more you can focus on the actual project.

What palette should I use, though? I don't want it to be too simple, but too much complexity poisons the SNES look. I did some pixelart research, and found an amazing forum post by DawnBringer on PixelJoint. In it he explains his choice of a 16-color palette, and shows some awesome examples.

I decided to run with it, and did some tests. The game will have a lot of metal (brass, copper, chrome) and the palette ALMOST has enough to make those work well. I'm going with a pretty dark overall look, and so I decided to add a range of desaturated greybrowns across the entire value spectrum to my personal palette. The results are the stripes seen behind the creature in the header image above!

That said, I'm not going to be too strict. The game will have tons of glow effects, and as fun as it would be to be strict with every single one and dither it all away, I'm going to fudge things quite a bit. Taking a color here and skewing its brightness/saturation there. It's cheating, but since my limits are self-imposed I don't think it's the end of the world.