Anonymous asked:
mr toe 42 i love your pixel art esp the upgrades have you considered sharing the palettes?
orteil42 answered:
Cookie Clicker’s upgrades and achievements spritesheet follows a 53-color palette (+transparent)!
this palette was unplanned and instead evolved organically as i eyeballed stuff for the first few months until i started feeling uncomfortable adding new colors when i could just colorpick from previous sprites! as a result there’s a lot of overlap between colors and a particular concentration of beiges and browns due to the game’s nature but a lot of bridge colors are missing and now i feel too weird about introducing new ones! this is terrible practice! do not do this!
for comparison this is the palette i devised for Neverending Legacy!
42 colors! this was carefully developed before i even drew the first sprite and was meant to focus on cohesion, versatility and good transitions! unfortunately while this feels like the proper “professional” way to go about pixel art, in practice it still turned out oddly restrictive and honestly kind of a little drab! probably do not do this either i guess!
for any pixel projects after those two i’ve vowed to forgo unified palettes and resist the allure of sheet-wide color reuse and just pick new colors on the fly when needed! people can download gigabytes in seconds for god’s sake!
