Jump to content

Battle Sprite Palettes


deranger
 Share

Recommended Posts

I've been doing battle sprites for a while, but have never paid too much attention to their palettes. What are general rules to go by? Use IS's battle sprite palettes to get the general idea? Anyone with any expertise would be helpful.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Any chance of being a little more specific? Are we talking how to select a good color scheme in general? How to create the final palette (i.e. you want blue robes and pick a base 'middle' color and need to make the 'light' and 'dark' shades to go along with it)? Are we talking for building sprites/frames from the ground up or simply making a palette for an existing set of sprites such as one ripped directly from one of the GBA games?

Edited by Lord Glenn
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Are we talking for building sprites/frames from the ground up or simply making a palette for an existing set of sprites such as one ripped directly from one of the GBA games?

More the former. I was just wondering if battle sprite palettes always had saturation within a certain range and/or had a general differentness in the RGB values between shades. Should probably just look at the data for IS's work.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

More the former. I was just wondering if battle sprite palettes always had saturation within a certain range and/or had a general differentness in the RGB values between shades. Should probably just look at the data for IS's work.

As far as I've been able to tell, I don't think there's a consistent saturation level or a consistent differential between shades. Doesn't mean that there isn't one, just that I've never picked up on it if there is. And while IS's examples are a good place to start, you will undoubtedly want to tweak stuff around, especially once you work on it a bunch. And, to that end, I offer the following advice: when you're zoomed in on a sprite to see the finer details and the shades look like they're separated enough, once that sprite is visible in a 240x160 window and animated, it probably won't look as separated as up close. Unlike face sprites (which have more visible area to work with and make use of shading), I've found that what you might initially think is too much of a separation between shades actually ends up being the right amount of separation.

Honestly though, when it comes to picking shades to go along with something, I'll play with the Hue/Saturation/Brightness, tweaking values off of one shade to go darker/lighter and then repeat that with the next shade down the line. I might take something that has a saturation of 185, a hue in the green range of 90, and a brightness of 160 and, to create something darker, decrease the hue 2-5 points down towards yellow, up the saturation by 1, and drop the brightness by 42. And if that doesn't work, then I fiddle with it some more until it's something I like that fits.

I don't know if this really helps any or not?

Edited by Lord Glenn
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Make sure all your RGB values are multiples of 8 for best effect/accuracy - GBA uses 16 bit colors, after all.

(Note: Using FE Recolor makes the above very easy, since it keeps the 0-31 value range.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Make sure all your RGB values are multiples of 8 for best effect/accuracy - GBA uses 16 bit colors, after all.

(Note: Using FE Recolor makes the above very easy, since it keeps the 0-31 value range.)

Isn't it multiples of 4?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Nope, Siuloir's got it right. Multiples of 8. Also, I think Usenti can (or will) automatically align your colors to those multiples of eight? (I feel like I remember hearing this somewhere.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not automatically, I think, but it's easier to do so?
There's also the requantize option, but that's really only if you have too many colors and need to forcibly reduce them.

Edited by Elsa's Hair
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Nope, Siuloir's got it right. Multiples of 8. Also, I think Usenti can (or will) automatically align your colors to those multiples of eight? (I feel like I remember hearing this somewhere.)

Usenti uses RGB values of range 0-31 as opposed to 0-255 (i.e. 16-bit); thus, if you bring in a colour that's not quite within that, it rounds it to the nearest one that does.

I'd try to avoid using Usenti for much other than graphics you're inserting directly with GBAGE or requantitizing the palette though, it can do some pretty weird buggy shit, particularly to files that are not PNG or BMP in my experience :P

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...