Here's another palette project. First, the BBC micro palette. It's has the basic extreme colors.
Again, the idea is to do a palette which is less abstract/graphical and more useful for figurative game stuff. First, I brought down the saturation overall, and also warmed up some colors.
- Red -> A red-brown can work as blood, wood and earth. Games often have terrain and I think a dirt color is needed. The new red can work as a shadow color for the yellow.
- Green -> I think a warm green is more pleasant, so I threw some yellow into it.
- Blue -> An extreme blue is already kind of dark. It's not really useful as a solid color for character appearing against black. I could make it lighter, but I already have the cyan. I decided to go even darker and decrease saturation further. This gave me a shadow color which can be used with the gray, cyan, brown and green. I might have made it too dark, or not. A dark blue works as a background color for the underwater environments in Exile for example.
- Cyan -> Is this a sky color, or just a generic cyan? I didn't like the super cyan, so I pulled it towards blue a bit. This darkened it, but since I no longer have a plain blue, maybe I needed to shift the cyan towards blue.
- Magenta -> So, I'm not a fan of magenta. It's such an... abstract color. I turned it into gray. The magenta was really close to the red, so one option I had was turning it into something more purple/blue, or maybe a lighter pink. However, I felt a gray was overall more useful.
- Yellow -> A pure yellow is pretty bright, and almost too close to the white. I made a darker yellow skin tone of sorts instead.
- White -> No change.
- Black -> No change.
The palette works pretty well on Sim City where you need a dirt color, as well as gray for the concrete and asphalt stuff. I can't find a good screenshot of the game to work on though. Exile is another game which has a lot of earth environments, and I think my palette might work there.
Edit: Only screen I could find. Made a sloppy edit. Certainly less graphical and striking, but also easier on the eyes I think.
Edit: The palette doesn't work that great with abstract/graphical games like Pacman, because of the lack of a blue for the mid-blue maze and pink for pinky.
Edit again: The colors were desaturated on a TV. I've seen screenshots where the magenta almost looks gray. My palette is made for modern monitors of course.