After hours of falling down trying to climb walls in the creation of Meteor Boy's art I suddenly realize that using the 16 color C64 palette for such a large res game is foolish. Large by old skool standards anyway.
Even the Amiga, with it's richer palette, was only 320 X 256. Meteor Boy is 800 X 600, which is about 250% greater! Earlier I posted I had a feeling it may not make sense to use the C64 palette but not it's other restrictions.
640x256/240/200 was also a standard resolution for Amiga (used by some pinball games, aside from the desktop)
Anyway, the 4096-color master palette of Amiga OCS/ECS is pretty much ideal for creating palettes, it prevents you from making too-similar colors while still offering all the colors you could meaningfully choose between. I used it to build the new OHRRPGCE master palette (
http://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=60), with a little smoothing out of color ramps in full 24bit after the basic color selection. If you're making your own palette, I really recommend that kind of simplification, it saves quite a bit of meaningless agonizing.
Now I feel that the C64's palette complements it's res and display restrictions. With 800 X 600 you lose that low res charm and you're only left with the odd, often ugly, color combinations. Too many pixels to fill with too few colors. Creating detailed sprites with those 16 colors doesn't feel or look right. I need more colors for this project.
I am officially abandoning the C64 palette right now. Meteor Boy will get totally redone with a new larger palette.
Screw you, Commodore64!! Yet I am the one that's defeated . . . oh well, this is one of those learn the hard way things. So be it. Oh well, I don't care, because now I'm really ready to roll! Hopefully I don't underestimate pixel art restrictions again. If you feel you'd like to dispute my point of view in the c64 palette thing, let's hear it.
One thing about the C64's (and CPC's) charm is widepixels. There is just something cute about widepixels. You could try running at 400x600 (== 800x600 square pixels), I think it would work quite well with the motifs of this game.
EDIT: Yeah, sort of like your new post says.