Need some help with colours (NES palette)

[Noktai]

Hello,

I'm a programmer who loves prototyping little games. I just did some random stuff for art that I thought was okay, but I want to go a little deeper into art now.
In order to get a better understanding/practise in colours I decided to limit myself to an NES palette.



I had a hard time with shading multiple layers of background environments due to the limited amount of shades that the palette provides, but I feel like I managed okay:

(all images are scaled 200%)


I wanted to experiment creating a scene during the night, but I really had no clue how to shade the background layers.

(those coloured things are ghosts, they will be touched up later :p)

Once I started using a different type of floor I completely lost grasp of what colours to use. I've searched complimentary colours but it all just ends up being ugly somehow.



I can colour the other level with any colour and it still ends up looking okay somehow. One of the foreground objects would blend in with the pink though.


Here are some animations aswell,feel free to give me any pointers on those as well

running


slash forwards


jumping


aerial slash (this one seems to be a bit hard to read, she's slashing downwards while spreading her legs, I hope it will be better to read in the game)


I have little artistic talent, I feel like my drawing skills are at their limits, but I could improve in understanding of colours. So any help would be appreciated

[Grimsane]

I quite like this, it's clean and readable, and has a charm to it, the animations are rather nice and simple too.

hard to make a call on the downward slash, as it could work entirely fine in gameplay,

have you considered a separate falling animation? and at the moment the jump looks like a very low height leap, like if she was ninja leaping between posts or some such, so maybe a new high jump and fall animation?
suggestion on a possible approach for falling


here is some suggestions on possible the colors, yeah there are a lot of colors that work together, this is a nicer NES palette version than I generally see, it's been hand tweaked by the looks



if you have sprite flipping like the NES had, you could do stars with 1 tile like so

[Noktai]

I quite like this, it's clean and readable, and has a charm to it, the animations are rather nice and simple too.

hard to make a call on the downward slash, as it could work entirely fine in gameplay,

have you considered a separate falling animation? and at the moment the jump looks like a very low height leap, like if she was ninja leaping between posts or some such, so maybe a new high jump and fall animation?
suggestion on a possible approach for falling


here is some suggestions on possible the colors, yeah there are a lot of colors that work together, this is a nicer NES palette version than I generally see, it's been hand tweaked by the looks



if you have sprite flipping like the NES had, you could do stars with 1 tile like so

I actually do have a falling animation, but I didn't think it was worth posting it up haha.

Yours seems a bit more epic though :p

Yeah I wasn't too sure about the jump, another thing I would decide when I actually programmed it.
But I didn't want it too regular of a jump, I wanted to give it some ninja flavour.
I did make an alternative jump that doesn't telegraph any sideways motion.

Seems like the gif is a bit fast though.


I do like your palette for the night level, the red one has a really ominous feeling, which might not be what I was going for it, but it's still awesome. From the cyan and black edit I can see I might be too strict with shading, as I only picked shading in the same hue.

I'm not using any limitation of the NES, just the colour palette, so I can do stars without worries

I actually edited the other level, but I see that I also was too strict here, so I'll probably revise it again.



Anway, thanks for the help!

[Rosier]

Her hair in a lot of the animations is kinda all over the place.  It needs to flow a bit more, and not be so stiff.

[Manupix]

I only picked shading in the same hue.

Bad idea! For a realistic approach picking a close hue is recommended, but not the exact same. There's 2 main reasons for this:
1- that's not how shadows work IRL; on the contrary shadows will pick a hue from reflected light from such as grass, a secondary light source like blue sky, etc. They will generally be cold outside and warm inside. Classic painters usually mix some green into theirs.
2- that's not how you build/use a nice palette. Hue shifting and color recycling help a lot.

In this particular non-realistic case with no shading in the proper sense, throw all caution away and just look for nice color combinations!

[Noktai]

I only picked shading in the same hue.

Bad idea! For a realistic approach picking a close hue is recommended, but not the exact same. There's 2 main reasons for this:
1- that's not how shadows work IRL; on the contrary shadows will pick a hue from reflected light from such as grass, a secondary light source like blue sky, etc. They will generally be cold outside and warm inside. Classic painters usually mix some green into theirs.
2- that's not how you build/use a nice palette. Hue shifting and color recycling help a lot.

In this particular non-realistic case with no shading in the proper sense, throw all caution away and just look for nice color combinations!

Yeah I noticed that when Grimsane posted up his edits, I will need to experiment with it a bit more.

I've put the animations in the game and it seems like there are still a few problems.



The Aerial slash still does not read very well.
And the jump is still a bit akward, I did get used to it over time, but especially from idle it looks kind of strange.
The upwards slash is just plain underwelming.
The dash seems okay, it will look better once I add some particles.

[Alexanator28]

I think the character is floating one pixel too high on the ground.
Other than that it looks great.

[astraldata]

If you'd post all your animations and moveset functions you have so far, and label them, we could give you a hand with helping you resolve your issues with them. It's hard to see which animations are separate in movements, like the aerial dash for example, with the guy running all over the place.