claude-dev-suite Color Palettes for 2D Games
Quick refs: lospec-recommended-palettes.md, hue-shift-recipes.md
A pixel art project benefits from a restricted palette: limits creativity productively, ensures cohesion, eases palette swaps for character / time-of-day / status variants.
Color theory cheat sheet
Practical rules for game art (not academic):
- Complementary: opposite on color wheel (red / cyan). High contrast, draws focus. Use for hero vs background, key UI elements.
- Analogous: adjacent on wheel (orange + yellow + red). Cohesive, natural. Use for environment palettes.
- Triadic: 3 evenly spaced (red / yellow / blue). Vibrant, balanced, classic cartoon look.
- Split-complementary: base + 2 colors adjacent to its complement. More forgiving than full complementary.
Mood mapping (rough):
| Mood | Palette feel |
|---|---|
| Cheerful, kid-friendly | Saturated triadic, warm dominant |
| Tense, horror | Desaturated, dark, narrow hue range |
| Mystical / magical | Analogous purples + blues with neon accents |
| Apocalyptic | Brown + orange + dark teal (Mad Max look) |
| Underwater | Cyan + teal + green dominant, warm accents on creatures |
Restricted palettes (recommended starts)
| Palette | Colors | Source | Use case |
|---|---|---|---|
| GameBoy DMG | 4 (greens) | Hardware | Authentic GB look |
| PICO-8 | 16 | Lexaloffle fantasy console | Modern lo-fi indie |
| PICO-8 secret | +16 (32 total) | Hidden in PICO-8 | Extended lo-fi |
| DB16 | 16 | DawnBringer (Dan Hascome) | Versatile general use |
| DB32 | 32 | DawnBringer | Stardew / Hyper Light Drifter style |
| AAP-64 | 64 | adigun a. polack | Painterly pixel art |
| NES | 54 | Hardware (4 sub-palettes of 4) | Authentic NES |
| C64 | 16 | Hardware | Authentic C64 |
| MS-DOS / EGA | 16 | IBM EGA hardware | DOS-era games |
| Resurrect 64 | 64 | Kerrie Lake | Modern indie |
| Sweetie 16 | 16 | GrafxKid | Friendly cartoony |
Lospec.com = the de-facto repository. Sortable by color count, search keyword, download in any format.
Color count tradeoffs
- 4-8 colors: GameBoy / Atari look. Forces strong silhouettes. Animation cheap.
- 16 colors: PICO-8 / DB16. Sweet spot for indie. Rich enough for shading + outlines + accent colors.
- 32-64 colors: AAP-64 / DB32. Modern pixel art. Allows hue shifting without running out of slots.
- 128+ colors: Painterly territory. No longer "restricted palette" — becomes texture-based art.
Most modern indie pixel art uses 32-48 colors total project-wide, with sub-palettes of ~16 per scene/character.
Hue shifting (the key technique)
Naive shading: take base color, decrease lightness for shadow, increase for highlight (RGB straight-line).
shadow base highlight
#3a3a3a → #6e6e6e → #aaaaaa (gray ramp - boring)
Hue shifting: rotate hue toward cool (blue/purple) for shadow, toward warm (yellow/orange) for highlight. Result feels alive.
shadow base highlight
#3a3a6e → #5e6e6e → #aaaa6e (subtle hue shift in shading ramp)
See quick-ref/hue-shift-recipes.md for canonical ramps (skin, foliage, stone, water).
Rule of thumb: shadow side hue rotates toward dominant ambient/sky color (often cool blue), highlight side toward warm (sunlight orange).
Color ramps
A "ramp" = ordered list of N colors used for one material's shading. Typical ramp length: 4-7 colors.
Foliage ramp (5 colors):
#1a3a18 → #2e5a2a → #4a7a3e → #7a9a52 → #aabd6a
darkest shadow base lit highlight
Stone ramp (5 colors, hue-shifted):
#2a2638 → #4a4252 → #6c6276 → #8e8896 → #b0b0b0
Skin ramp (warm bias):
#5a3232 → #8a5050 → #b87878 → #d8a070 → #f0c898
Water ramp (cool bias):
#1a2a4a → #2e4a76 → #5278a8 → #88a8d0 → #b8d8f0
Reuse a ramp across multiple objects of the same material → cohesion.
Palette swap conventions
Replace the palette without redrawing the sprite. Used for:
- Character variants (red / blue / green hero in same outfit).
- Faction colors (good guys orange, enemies purple).
- Status effects (poisoned = purple tint, frozen = cyan tint).
- Time of day (day → dusk → night palette swap on the entire scene).
- Damage flash (full white palette for 2 frames on hit).
Two implementation strategies:
1. Indexed mode (Aseprite + engine support)
Sprite stored as palette indices, engine looks up colors at render time. Trivial swap: change palette LUT.
- Aseprite: Mode → Indexed.
- Unity: requires custom shader sampling palette texture.
- Godot: built-in via shader
texture(palette, vec2(index, 0.5)).
2. Color replacement shader
Sprite stored RGB, shader detects "base color N" → outputs "swap color N". Works in any engine. Supports up to 8-16 colors (limited by shader uniforms).
Day / night palette shifts
Sample workflow:
- Author the day palette as default.
- Define a night palette mapping: each day color → corresponding night color (usually cooler + darker + slight purple tint).
- Engine fades between palettes over X seconds at sunset/sunrise.
- Optionally: emissive sprites (street lamps, fireflies) bypass the palette swap (always lit color).
File formats
.gpl(GIMP) — text format, widely supported..ase/.aseprite— Aseprite native (binary)..pal(JASC / Microsoft) — text RGB list..json— Lospec / custom (RGB array)..hex— Lospec text export, just hex codes one per line..png— strip image (1px tall), sampled by engine.
Aseprite's Edit → Convert Palette → Save Palette exports any combination.
Common mistakes
- Too many colors: 200+ colors = painted, not pixel art. Restrict.
- Not reusing ramps: every object has its own colors → no cohesion.
- Pure value gradient (no hue shift): looks dead.
- Mid-tone gap: ramp jumps from 30% → 70% lightness with no 50% → banding. Fix: paint mid-tones.
- Outline always pure black: looks heavy / cartoony. Use very dark variant of fill color instead.
- Saturation crushed in shadows: shadows shouldn't go gray; keep some chroma.
- Over-saturated palette: looks cheap. Pull saturation back ~80% from picker max.
See also
- pixel-art-fundamentals/SKILL.md
- lighting-art/SKILL.md
- tools/SKILL.md — Aseprite indexed-mode workflow