Pixel Art Class - Should you stick to a palette?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ก.ค. 2024
- Heya Pals!
New Pixel Art Class video for you (first of the year!) all about breaking the palette. I've changed my approach on this topic in the last few years, and I wanted to share these lessons with you to help guide you through them.
Enjoy!
Pixel Joint forum link: pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_po...
Chapters:
0:00 - Intro
1:10 - Why use Palettes?
3:50 - How Important is an Art Style?
4:56 - When popular games Break the Palette
12:24 - When is it okay to do it?
16:39 - Examples from my recent work
25:13 - Insignia / Channel Updates
26:09 - Outro
Music:
Mario & Sleep - Nate and Canaan Evans [gamechops.com/mariopiano/]
----
Catch my stream: Weekdays 1-6pm AEST.
Twitch: / adamcyounis
Twitter: / adamcyounis
Tiktok: / adamcyounis
Discord: / discord
Become a Patron at / adamcyounis
Download assets and games from the stream at uppon-hill.itch.io/
Later, pals! - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
I like the idea of having a core palette for the game, with "sub-palettes" for different areas/biomes. It helps with creating a coherent look and feel by still restricting yourself in the amount of colors, but having the areas contrast with each other.
This was my thought, too. And many retro games would swap palettes in exactly this way for different areas.
@@hanyodosstayeah, it's important to remember that games for "4th gen" consoles like the SNES generally didnt have large static pallettes, but rather a bunch of smaller 15-color palettes, and could use 4 _onscreen_ at once (for Genesis), or up to _16_ (for SNES)
You could change the palettes loaded whenever you want, and even change them at a certain horizontal onscreeen line to make different colors for underwater
Thank you for making this video. Very few content creators have the confidence/ability to compare their work to others and compare and contrast the methods and thought processes behind them.
Your use of color is honestly one of my favorite things I've seen in pixel art. It almost hits the part of my brain that loves water color, while still clearly being pixel art.
Yeah, I think they are also a good fit for rotoscoped games like Another World and Flashback.
I didn't use a set color palette for my first two game projects, and oh boy, was I missing out! My game art has gotten SO much better using a 32-color palette. It adds tons of stylistic consistency, and while this is kind of a game dev cliché, it's a great example of limitation breeding creativity. For example, if you're making a tree and you run out of green, instead of making a new green that's too close in hue to your existing ones, use a yellow or blue in your palette, and that tree will look way nicer. For devs like me with no art background, it's really helpful that a good palette can do the hue shifting for you. That way, you won't have to guess if you're moving the sliders the right amount. Anyway, great video as always! Thanks for the tips!
I saw you mention this topic in a short recently and it completely changed the way I make pixel art, so glad you made a whole video on it!!
You are literally a next level content creator, I am so so happy to have found your channel. I've been watching random videos of yours while I work on my screen printing, but god does this make me want to run to my computer and design. I'm starting your Pixel class from 1 to the end. You literally make me excited to learn.
Excellent video essay on pallettes, Adam. It's something I still struggle with. Finding the balance of when to use them them and when or how to break them is so important. I also love how much the look of your game has evolved just by expanding your pallette to enrich the details that would otherwise be lost in limitations. It's very painterly and absolutely gorgeous.
This video came at the perfect time, thank you Adam!
I think it's a good idea to have palette limitations _per sprite,_ at least. That is, not allowing a single sprite to use like 86 different colors at once
agreed, there is only very rarely a good reason to do more than a handful of colors per sprite
@@EB-bl6cc I personally find 15 to be a good balance for something complex like a character sprite
Amazing as always
Great video. Very insightful!
I don’t personally do pixel art or make games. But I always enjoy watching your videos. ❤
Thanks so much for this! I'd been trying to make a tileset in Aesprite, and all the pixel art guidance online was like "use a palette or you are bad pixel art noob!" But I was really struggling to get the look I wanted. This is really good advice.
Thank you for bringing this up!
I learned in a hard way, that in pixel art done for a complex scene, palette limitation is better done in per-object basis rather than per-overall-scene basis. That way, you will have more color control for each object, gameplay-wise and aesthetic-wise.
Never, ever, limit the palette at the start of drawing. Better start with coloring the smallest object possible, then gradually color the larger object with color reference based on the previous object.
I started with my player character to get an idea of where the palette should go. Ended up with a very nice warm to cool color gradient for object pallette 1
Ive been currently holding myself to Genesis color limitations: 512 possible colors, 15 non-transparent colors per palette, no partial transparency. I find the colors of the genesis give a nice "warm and soft" feeling
Nice video and topic!
Pixel art games relying a lot on dynamic/procedual lighting is usually a big visual pet peeve of mine. I wish people would at least experiment more with palettizing/color reducing effects if the engine allows for it. I think that would potentially make for a very interesting and more concise look. I actually tried this when running Doom with PBR textures since GZDoom has settings for palettizing the entire image, so you don't get the otherwise indexed 256 color textures offset by these ultra smooth gradients from the light reflections.
A good comparison with this kind of clashing aesthetic would be the early days of digitally colored comics in the 90s.
Great topic!
I love the fact that when i have a question you ALWAYS arrive the next day with the answer
It's because he setted up mics in your home
@@dablues6573 I access the disk remotely and service accounts.
The statue you've shown in the later area from Insignia looks beautiful and yet it doesn't overpower the foreground. Incredible.
A great exercise to study color palettes is the game Chicory. It gives you four colors to color in the world around you. Different zones have a different set of colors.
這些關於顏色的分享，大大增加製作遊戲者對美感的認知，別總是用一對鮮豔無比雜亂無章的顏色，很容易讓玩家疲勞；這考驗的不只是製作遊戲，而是人對於視覺上和情感上的感受，內容無私很棒!!
QUESTION: Do you make 1 main palette per game, that encompasses characters, environments, enemies, UI, etc? Or each level has its own palette, and characters have their own palette that is compatible? I'm working on project where environments are darker values, lower saturation, and characters are lighter value, more saturated - and I was thinking of overlaying (blend mode) a solid texture/gradient between the scene and camera that acts as a "mother color" (term I learned from acrylic painters) to help bring the hues into harmony in lieu of using a palette. Would love to hear your thoughts on how you can keep nonchanging hues of characters/UI compatible with the changing hues in different levels.
Thank you ❤
It really depends on what you’re going for. Palettes look very orderly and intentional, and obviously help if you’re going for a retro aesthetic. I don’t always use palettes, as I prefer intense psychedelic 32 bit-looking work.
I don’t like pixel art for the retro appeal, but rather the mathematic and precise look to it. As such, palettes can help with that. Palette filtering can almost be a cheat to create a sense of precisions. For more surreal and intense images, I tend to use a wide range of colors in a small space, however.
I’ve been doing pixel art since I was 8. I started shading at 14 and would just use the default MS Paint colors, meaning I’d use two shades, black and white for highlights and shadows.
My pixel art really took off with me starting to make Doom mods which, before I started using OpenGL, forced me to use palettes. However, strategically using alpha values and other fancy stuff allowed me to make more of a menagerie of colors and images. Though, if you use transparencies in your pixel art, I’d recommend keeping with strict increments (I usually stick to 0.1 or 0.2 alpha value increments) and make the drop offs sharp.
Palette eases decision making and enforces stylistic constraints. Human generally have hard time working with more than 10 things at once, so condensing millions of colors to 10 relevant ones, is a good way to manage complexity. Of course you can have multiple compatible palettes for different art pieces. Say 10 palettes of 10 colors for different entities (one for grass, another for human characters, and third for fire magic effects, etc...).
I've been working on a game recently and have come across this same question. Sticking religiously to a palette makes it really difficult, at least for my newb brain, to distinguish elements from one another. I'm building an outdoor map/city-builder, and I have about 6 shades of brown to work with, but I'm finding that those 6 shades really aren't enough. I don't mind repeating shades of brown amongst the trees and the wood of houses, etc. But there are times when I feel too constrained by the palette, for example, if a character is wearing boots that should be brown, while walking on a dirt path that already has 4 shades of brown, the boots inevitably blend in with the path. I've been trying to figure out how people make games with a limited palette but also that "work" artistically. In the past, I would just wing the colors, using my intuition to choose colors, but that leads to a lack of cohesion - I do think limiting the palette is very useful. I just think that limiting an outdoor game to 40 colors may not be very realistic, at least for modern-looking games. I find myself resorting to cheating, in a sense, by lowering the opacity of certain colors/layers, in an effort to squeeze out some additional color variations without changing the actual root color. But if I'm going to do that, I might as well just expand my palette.
"The pallete is made for man, not man for the pallete" -- Jesus
...not sure who will get the reference, but there it is anyways
Is it lawful to do good or to do evil? To save a life or to let it perish?
🙏@@parmiggianoreggie-ano1832
We broke Gods moral law and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ took your just punishment unto himself so you might be forgiven and gifted eternal life. Trust in Christ as you would trust a parachute and repent of your Sins. Christ will reveal himself to you if you call his name.
Nice video!
I'm currently attempting a restoration of an old NES game I liked through the use of GameMaker, and I've quite enjoyed working on updating the sprites. I've done my best to stick to the original color pallet, although I've been taking advantage of modern technology and my lack of limitations by using altering shades of those colors to create the illusion of shadows and curves. I've done so much, in fact, that I'm starting to worry that I'm violating the original art style.
Somehow, I couldn't figure out how to transparent effects in my art program until last night, so up until now, I've had to manually color in stuff like ground shadows, meaning I've had to multiple sprites with many variants to reflect the many different "shadow atmospheres". I think I've decided to continue manually drawing shadows on objects via my pallet variants, but I'll use transparency overlaid via layers to for ground shadows. That way, I don't have to create a dozen copies of stuff like trees, and recolor the manual shadows to match everywhere that sprite is placed.
Either way, it's a lot of stressful choices. I was to stay true to the style, but stuff like the NES were limited by the tech at the time, and you can tell many of those 8bit artists of the time could have done significantly better if they weren't limited to like 8 colors.
What app do you use for pixel art? I mean the one I saw in your examples
Please more tutorials!!! :)
Can the program "Tiled" use 8x8 tiles as well as 16x16? Like... one layer uses 16x16, and then another layer for fine details uses 8x8? 'Cause if not, I'd have to increase the tilesheet with a bunch of unnecessary duplicate tiles with tiny variations.
Hey Adam, I am wanting to write and draw a children's book but I want to do it in pixel art. I cannot find any information on how to prepare pixel art for print. I know I will have to upscale but I am not sure how to do this without compromising the picture. Do you have a video on this, or can you make one, or can you give me advice? Thanks.
I'm glad you picked PALLET town for this video, lol
fuckin love this guy what a guy
whenever i break my palette it just makes me more stressed out when choosing colors and just makes my scenes more muddy
I just completed momodora yesterday 😊
One thought I have re: breaking palettes is it depends on how you are defining the palette; color is a wondrous thing, it really only exists in our heads, a property of how our brains perceive light... it DOESN'T really exist as a physical property on its own... & because of that there are all these weird edge cases (eg. brown is really just dark orange vs a bright background, which is why you can't have brown Christmas lights b/c to recreate the conditions where we perceive brown with a light in the dark)... but it also let's us cheat by making an observers brain re-categorize colors based on proximity to other colors.
Key examples from the video - Blasphemous 2 & Sea of Stars. In B2, while that wall might really be 50+ shades of brown (& if I'm not mistaken, some blues & grays too), the player just perceives it as brown. The different tones are instead read as texture.
For SoS, while the trees may be a gradient thru various shades of green upto a primary yellow... the player just perceives it as green trees.
In both cases, I would argue they ARE using a palette of maybe 5 colors, but each 'color' in the palette isn't just one RGB hex code, it's a range of 10+ close tones. Using that lense, for B2, the environment (as opposed to the characters) is actually 2-tone brown & gray; for SoS it's a 6 tone palette of blue, green, brown, white, purple, yellow (the latter 2 only being used for highlight details like flowers).
If folks are still not getting it... think of it this way - you can make a purple thing using only pixels w/ low green & approx. equal parts red & blue... or you can make a purple thing with a checkerboard pattern of pure red & blue pixels. We could further tint the pure-purple pixels with red & blue toned pixels, resulting in warmer or colder temperature purples. But... to the eye which is not trying to focus in on the individual pixels (which we DON'T do, by default, we fast scan the image then focus) it's ALL PURPLE. And you can use those principles to paint in a limited palette, while really using a gazillion colors to add texture & detail while still conveying all the dreeriness of a limited brown & gray corridor in Blasphemous 2.
I LOVE YOU ❤
One limitation of palettes that's been bugging me is... limitation. I've been working on a game with a GBC style colour palette (4 colours per 8x8 grid, often with 1 reserved for alpha) and while it's definitely an interesting challenge to work with, I am beyond done with it at this point and wanting to move onto something less restrictive, that lets me express more detail and emotion.
Try a bigger palette, then, lol. :D
Glad you called out this idea that if you don't adhere strictly to the palette, then it's not "real pixel art". It's kinda dispiriting to see this idea being so prevalent.
Really good video ! It's interesting to hear your perspective on this c:
Schindler's list broker the pallet.
For me strict color palletes are not necessary anymore. They used it for older pc or console games because of the perfomance limitations they had. If you look on physical art color palletes are way bigger and not strict most of the time. For me the only important thing is the setting horror = dark / happy = high contrast / sad = low contrast just to name few examples.
Muito legal ver o monodora aqui, um jogo brasileiro.
Seems like a lot of the games with the post processing have a palette for the sprite art and then just apply effects on top of it. Sometimes this looks better than others...
TL;DW
Don’t worry about it. If you need / want more colors, add more colors!
Great video btw, I’ve learned so much from your channel!
Honestly I just go with what feels organic in my game. I kind of have an idea of what colors I want to use and then play around until it feels right.
That being said let me know what you think of my pixel art on my channel.
Talking about Insignia: what are you doing to avoid one of the most common pitfalls of video game writing: lack of brevity. It's a problem of over 95% of games that the dialogue drags on and on without conveying relevant information or advancing the plot.
All I can say to that is that I look to maintain a sense of player empathy, and to cater the experience to players in a way that gives them the space to enjoy the game how they like. Some players love reading, others don't, so the idea would be to use unskippable dialogue only for moments where it's critical to understand what's happening.
@@AdamCYounis I wish you all the best with your game!
and for some reason, my sprites always delete themselves in aseprite. Like the layers vanish/delete. I'm working, and then i backtrack and see that some of it is gone. That happens A LOT. I'm always having to start over, feeling confused at what's going on.
Which version are you using? I've never seen that before with thousands of hours in the app... but if it's a bug in the current version it would be worth reporting.
version 1.3.2 -- also another problem i'm facing is that when i'm doing an animation, a "Cell" disappears, and it deletes the whole sprite. The "Cell" as in the black dot mark in layers. I dunno what I do, if it's clicking too much or what, but the dot goes away along with the sprite. @@AdamCYounis
it happened again, but this time I did Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y and looked in the corner to see the message, and it said "Undo/Redo Move Range" so I have no idea how I did that.
But I searched up and saw a post on reddit about it from 2 years ago called "Move Range removing cells", but there were no solutions given. @@AdamCYounis
So it happens when I'm click/dragging along the frame line. I dunno what I did/ miss click or something, and it moves the cell/deletes.
it happened again. I did Ctrl+Z/Y so i could see the message in the corner for whatever happened, and it said "move range" so whenever i'm clicking/draging along the frames, i missclick or something, and it moves the cell/makes it delete. @@AdamCYounis
also i am wondering how do you copy/paste into multiple frames? i'm trying to build a tileset and I got a water animation with a lot of frames, and I need to copy the whole thing, and paste it to another part, but flip it. And i'd hate to have to do it all individually.@@AdamCYounis
So basically this whole video was about having a large palette 🙃
Amigo, crie um curso na Udemy, será um sucesso. Seus vídeos são ótimos.
There's a pixel game I saw years s ago that looked like a cyber punk version of Blasphemous where you use the mouse and cursor to shoot. It looked amazing but I forgot the name of it or the person producing it. It's been in production for years now because only one person (or maybe 3 people were making it). A game with that type of aesthetic would make a lot of money.
You're talking about either "The Last Night" or "Replaced", and I think the first one got cancelled sadly.
@@MadPropzBaller it was actually neither of them. I'm looking for the game right now, I had it on a TH-cam account that was banned over a year... This game was much faster than Blasphemous, Replaced or the last night. I'd never seen anything like it . Even faster than Katana zero with the movement.
Sinus?
@@mrt445 A game just came out in my feed called Kusan - City of Wolves, would be a weird coincidence but is that the one?
@@MadPropzBaller No, I've seen that game and it looks amazing but that's a top down game. The game I'm talking about is a side scroller.
Damn you work slow, 3 years later and you still basically are exactly the same position you were three years ago, every time I come to see if this game is finished, its always long streams where you just edit a few pixels constantly, rather than actually work on something, If I were to look at your game from 3 years ago, to looking at it today, the only thing I would notice is a slight change in art.
Perfection is gonna be the death of your game. Its like you made a few assets and now are just banking on them
Claiming its cause you are a solo dev is an excuse.
If you haven't made my game I'm not sure how you could know how long it should take to make it.