I don't think the question is really going to break anything, though. As NES art is more or less always simple, tweaking or even completely re-doing a palette doesn't ruin a project or take a huge amount of time compared to any modern platform. The colors I used were completely made up with ones I thought would be reasonable for the NES to produce, knowing they'd have to be later replaced with appropriate ones. In this sort of situation my solution is to make the art as I'd like to see it, then quantize the colors to what the NES palette can produce, and see how the results are. If it's no good, try other palettes.koitsu wrote:Driving home Sik's question even more: the question "does the NES even have these colours?" is valid, and should be followed by "if so, are the colours you're using actually decent-looking on an actual NES vs. an emulator?" Things do tend to look a bit different on an actual television (NTSC known for being called "never the same colour" for a reason), but more importantly some of those colours might not actually visually "mix" well on an actual screen (i.e. they might look fine in an emulator with a specific palette but might look like an ugly mess on actual hardware).
Here, I edited it to use palette colors pulled from a rendition of the NES palette;
The skin shading tone isn't perfect, but it's not far off enough that I'm upset by it. The loss of definition from its removal would necessitate different art.
EDIT: I think I prefer this version now, actually - the skin tones don't turn from yellow-ish to pink-ish as much.
I think this question is important in some contexts, but not all. In a game that is attempting to convey a sense of realism in other areas, be it physics, plot, or anything else, the artist will likely wish to continue this theme in the art. So, relative proportions for most of the art is important in keeping the theme believable.tepples wrote:One question every graphic designer for a 2D game should ask herself: What is a meter? I can think of a few things that are close:
- Length of pendulum with period 2 seconds
- 1/40,000,000 of the planet's circumference
- Distance light travels through vacuum in 1/300,000,000 second
- Length of each side of a Koopature Science Floating Storage Cube
- A number of pixels that should be consistent at the same depth level of any given scene
In most (nearly all?) games for the NES, designers opted to abstract things like character designs and the appearance of the worlds they create. It could be to better respect and utilize the limitations of the system, or be just a stylistic choice. As a result, many games have a more "cartoonish" look - charracters have extra large heads to allow a larger canvas for facial expression, doors might be exactly the same height as the player, the vegetables in Mario 2 are huge compared to Mario (despite the Nintendo Power Mario 2 cover depicting them as something that fits easily in his hand). These 'inaccuracies of scale' are perfectly acceptable because they represent an idea that is supposed to be fleshed out in the mind of the player.