Custom Palettes

I've been messing around, trying to make myself a master palette that better suits my spriting needs. It's that epic struggle between having enough hues and having enough shades packed into one little 256-color palette that I find myself caught in whenever I try to make graphics for the OHR. At the moment, this is what I've come up with (though I'll definitely be tweaking it as time goes by):



Do any of you use nonstandard master palettes? Do you make them yourself or do you find them somewhere else?

I actually don't like the current master palette much at all. I generally make one with a few basic shades myself and then add more colors and shades as I go as I need them. It's probably not the smartest way to do things, but it's worked so far.

This is the current one I'm using in Cool Guy and in Village People:

---

Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

I actually did pretty much the same thing with Legacy. I started out with 24 colors I think, and then added or discarded colors as I went. Problem is, the current palette I use now is rather messy, and it could do with a lot of optimization.

---

Being from the third world, I reserve the right to speak in the third person.

Using Editor version wip 20170527 gfx_sdl+fb music_sdl

It's a lot smarter than what I did last time: started with the default palette and overwrote bits of it that I apparently wasn't using with new ramps as I went.

Anyone is welcome to offer suitable master palettes to be be included with the engine in the imports folder. I keep bringing it up but nobody has taken up the offer yet.

An 11x23 shaped palette is interesting. We could probably add an option to let you configure the shape in which the master palette is drawn in the sprite editors.

I've been using a slightly modified variation of the current default OHR master palette that replaces color 0 with a bright magenta, instead of having two black colors in the palette. This helps IMMENSELY with maptile transparency.

---

To friends long gone, and those I've yet to meet - thank you.

My palette is still 16x16, I just arranged it as 11x23 to make it easier for you guys to see the color gradients.

I've recently gotten into the "less is more" mentality. Low to medium color saturation on the low end allowing darker tones to meld together well, then ramping to greater saturation as the luminosity increases. I'm currently using a 20 color palette that I've derived from a few other palettes I liked and tweaked.



Using this method, it allows me to get some great effects while lowering the overall number of colors I need to do so. This is a GPX dump of some old sprites and tiles of mine, remade using this palette:

---

Soda Piggy Website

In relation to VampiDucki's post (beautiful screenshot, by the way!) using a well-designed limited color palette teaches you worlds about how colors work and relate, and how to more effectively structure color ramps when you have more colors to work with.

There is a 16-color palette I found on Pixellation a long time ago which taught me tons about color and art in general, just from playing with it. I'm pretty sure it taught me more about effective color use than anything else in my life, and I have years of higher-level art education under my belt.

Don't pick a limited color palette then go 8-bit though. Doing 8-bit is great for learning other things, especially sprite readability, but obviously not for learning about color ramps and hue shifting!

I had plans, back while I was doing my Art Tutorial, to make a palette which was structured by 'material' rather than base color... and...

I'm going to play with that idea again right now.

I've been doing mono-chrome palletes for Merciful Mungbeans, and that has helped me to improve as well.

---

dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
Play Orbs CCG: http://orbsccg.com/r/4r6x