Palette and colour

A palette chosen after the art is finished means repainting the art. Choose before the first pixel, and state it back to the user so they can object early.

Reasonable defaults when the user has no preference:

• "retro" / "8-bit" / no detail given → PICO-8 (16 colours, forgiving, reads well)
• "Game Boy" / "monochrome" → gameboy (4 values; pure form study)
• "NES-like" → a hand-built 12–16 colour palette, 3–4 hues × 4 values
• A specific game named → sample it: reference op sample_palette

Load one with palette op preset, or a file the user has with op load.

Most sprites want 8–32 colours total. Per material, 3–5 steps is plenty: shadow, base, light, and optionally a deep shadow and a specular.

More colours is not more quality. It is more decisions, more inconsistency, and a sprite that cannot be recoloured for a palette swap later.

A ramp is an ordered run of colours for one material. Build them with palette op ramp, which hue-shifts as it goes (see rules://02-shading-and-light). Reuse ramps across materials wherever you can — sharing the darkest step between skin and leather ties a sprite together and costs nothing.

draw and recolor snap every colour to the nearest palette entry by perceptual (CIELAB) distance, by default. Leave it on.

When the report says a colour moved a long way (ΔE > 12), that is the tool telling you the palette has no colour for what you asked. Do not turn the lock off to force it through — either pick a different colour or tell the user the palette needs a new entry and let them decide.

Value contrast, not hue contrast, carries readability. A sprite that is all mid-tones disappears against a background. Check by squinting — or run recolor op desaturate on a copy and see whether the shapes survive.

Keep the darkest and lightest steps of a ramp genuinely far apart. Two colours with ΔE under 3 are the same colour to a viewer; palette op analyze flags those as near-duplicates.