Nice application of index painting.  makes for a cool effect - it'd be great if you can get the engine to dynamically render it rather than have to bake it out as an animation.  I'm assuming you used index painting methods on the tiles too?

Hi I love your work! If I would know how to make the engine do it I could do  much cooler stuff, but I'm just 1 person and a hobbyist artist and programer, I only used dynamic indexing for the tile walls because that's when I found about it(it saved me a lot of time).
I think this method is really good with AA animations so I'm going to use it for the avatar that's supposed to change according to life status.
This is how it looks so far, it's also just 1 ramp as you can see, so it would be easier.

I've made a thread about it here, if you have any pointers I'd be more than happy to hear. http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=18076.0

Quote from: Phoenix849 on March 26, 2015, 10:16:38 am

Well, I don't think getting "closer" to background even makes sense in space.

Pretty sure that's water?

It's technically Space water and you're supposed to fight some generic fascist cyborg alien zombie fish type enemies.

Beware of contrast problems. The "water" ranges from almost black to almost white: what foreground enemies and objects are going to be easily distinguishable in both cases? You might try limiting the use of bright colours (for example, small specular highlights in moving waves and ripples rather than large blobs) to optimize for bright foreground objects.

I thought about having important objects in strong colors to circumvent that but you may be right, I think I'd try to get the game to a playable state and see from there.

By the way, I found a way to assign exact values but it's a bit clunky.
Oops, I just read a bit backwards and found I basically reinvented something already known lol...

Hi,
So I just came across this today and it's really amazing!
I just thought I might jump in and say you can get pretty accurate multicolor ramps. I played with this a lot today and found that you can even force preexisting pixel art to work with this in the same palette, the gradient has no limit to it's colors and you can use the curve and/or the exposure adjustment layer to make sure it uses the colors you want and only them.  Each ramp obviously needs it's own layer but you can reuse colors(the colors look the same but aren't the exact same value, this can be solved when saving).

I believe this can have broad implications on pixeling like animation for instance, you could aa transform sprites, or do an automated subpixeling animation using clipping-mask layers. I made this quick demonstration using 2 frames and no cleaning.

I also like the idea of being able to play with the palette real time without it being destructive, you just create a new gradient layer on top and/ or stuck with different adjustment layers like color lookup.
I'm currently looking for more things you can do with this technique, I'm very excited  

Hi,
So I just came across this amazing thing Spoiler today
and found out you can almost as easily set up pretty accurate multicolor ramps, I made this quickly from 2 frames without any cleaning to show how it works

It also has other implications like having all of Photoshop's tools at your disposal when pixeling, quickly changing palettes in Photoshop and so on.
The main weakness is that I may be able to use colors that look the same, but I don't know how to control the exact values, so you may want to make sure there are no colors overlapping or force it to the specific palette when saving.

Needles to say you still need a different layer for each color ramp though you can still reuse colors(sort of). You can transform different layers together, which means you could AA rotate or resize entire sprites( It obviously won't be perfect but could save a lot of time).
 
I figured most people who use this technique would also know how the make the ramps multicolored but I thought a lot of people didn't know about this and would find it useful. I also wondered if we could start a discussion about this technique, and maybe someone has an idea of how to make the process more efficient or assigning the palettes exact values. 
I forgot to write how I did this lol, I think it's pretty easy to understand if you did Dan Fessler's set up, if anyone wants to know exactly how I did something leave a comment.