Hi all! I'm just about done with this next game, but I seem to have a bit of a color issue with this guy, "Big Boy". For some crazy reason, I shaded it with black, when absolutely nothing else has black in it (brown is the darkest color in the entire game save the background). So, aside from any regular lighting CC stuff, any recommendations on how to ease the black out and get just the brown in?

With black:

Black simply filled in with brown, trying to think of some better way of handling it:

Here's the palette I'm using, I'm in too deep to change it at this point, which makes trying to salvage Big Boy all the more challenging




Any help is greatly appreciated!

-Johnny B.

Wow, it was like you where reading my mind! I'm totally adding some mandible type things I am the one making the game, so I can say there's an assload of boss battle goodness In fear of getting too far off topic, I'll just briefly state that there's a number of phases for this boss. Here's a peak at a couple of other forms, all these forms are fused together to make one ultra-epic boss battle SPOILER ALERT!

(1st) Mechanized form:


(2nd) Embryonic form:


(3rd) Adult/Monster form:


Now that I've worked so much on the last form, the others kinda look crappy lol. But that's okay, the adult form is kind of the "money shot" for this game I'll edit this post once I've redone the final boss If you're interested in discussing this game any further or are interested in testing, drop me a line at lazybraingames@gmail.com Thanks for the crits everyone!

Wow! Thanks for all the info guys! Currently I'm in near the end of a project, so I'm stuck with the whack palette for that one Sometime next week I'll commit the time to develop a new palette after absorbing all the information posted here For all the stuff I've done in the past, I just used 16 colors... and that it! I finally figured out that I there can only be 16 on-screen, not the whole game lol.

Thanks for all the help everyone!

-Johnny B.

Hi all! I'm Johnny B I've been making NES style games for a while now, and I'm hoping the Pixelation community might take pity on me and help me out with these 2 things...

1) Developing a non-insane 16 color palette for the NES
2) Finding some type of guide for making NES sprites/images

For the first one, the palette, if you've observed any of my posts, the colors are always the first to be pointed out as "broken" or "it makes my eyes hurt" lol. I've reviewed tutorials (including Arne's 16 color palette tutorial), I've searched online, and I haven't really figured out why my palettes are so whack. The reference I've been using is this...



From this, I basically just pull colors, and do my best lol. Is there something missing from this? I've done the best I can do with this, but I'm hoping some benevolent pixel artists might step in and show me the folley of my ways, or even better, just throw some palettes my way! I know that a proper pixel artist develops his own palette, but I don't really have any hang-ups on using a good palette that someone else helped develop Some reviewers have noted that the Lazy Brain Games are "colorful" go figure

As for the NES reference guide, is there a book or a website or something on what the specs for NES art is? Specs as in:

Max number of colors per sprite (is it 3 or 4?)
Max number of colors for the background
Max size of a sprite
Max number of frames per sprite
and so on...

I hope no one feels like I'm just trying to get other people to do the work for me, but I've spent quite a few hours searching for NES art guides, and working with palettes, and I got nothin' After seeing some of the amazing pixel art here, I know there's quite a lot of collective knowledge and experience. Are there any benevolent artists out there that could help me out with this stuff?

Gratefully,

-Johnny B.