The Fictional Famicube Project by Niklas Jansson

Version 8. (Code name: "Moonfinger") I turned a near white cyan-blue into another mid blue to facilitate sky gradient play. Might nuke the white-green and replace with a deep blood red, as I only have an orange red now and quite a jump to the adjacents. That said, the reds that I have are useful enough... I haven't really been missing a new red, and having gaps gives the palette some character, because now my lone red is that red. Maybe another skin tone then? Bad banding, dither or sick hues are quite unsightly on humans, less so on rocks, monsters and thingamajibs.

Version 7. (Code name: "Brighter Days") I made this palette using a lighter gamma (1.8 or 2.0 on my Mac), but PCs and TVs use 2.2 iirc (makes the images darker) so I lightened/curved up the palette a tad.

For v.6 I only changed one of the cold greens which was a bit too close to its neighbors, and one of the high skin tones (which was really to desaturated to be used as such) turned into a sandy bone color. Beaches are pretty common in games. Maybe I should check if I have an underwater sand color suitable for beaches too...? Later!

How did I choose these 64 colors? I think a palette made for 8 color sprites works differently from a 4 color one. In a 4 color palette, sprites are likely to use graphically strong flats. With 8 colors you can do more shadow+light, and in-betweens. Some of my colors are set up to fill those roles, but I also wanted to keep the strong NES color feel. I'm a big fan of including dark shades for black background games (I often favour that over textured backgrounds, so I don't have a lot of fogged colors I suppose).

Zelda 1: No, I'm not gonna do snot-green Link cloth, though mine's still quite warm.

Devil World: These enemies were redesigned a bit. My blue is wimpy but I use the same color index for the Mario sky so I don't want to make it obnoxiously saturated/teal.

Spartan X / Kung Fu: Beat em up games have a lot of large body animation frames, so palette swapped bodies is probably necessary to save tile space. It's a bit harder to puzzle together new poses from different small tiles when the colors aren't NES flat though.

Castlevania: Being more conservative with the colors here. Wall noise could use some work, as it's very haphazard. Unhappy with the muddy blocks here. They need to pop. I want to fit a Castlevania pink-orange into the palette somehow. (done in V4?)

SMB 1: I over-rendered the stuff here and used up too many 8 color palettes.

Sonic: A bit gritty, though maybe it has more to do with the overpopulation of features/characters which happens in mockups. Trying to pay heed to the color identity of the original game with the dark sky and colored background. Can't do parallax so maybe background tiles should be more fogged than in the original, or they might look like foreground stuff. Maybe some fog on the lake to get the same effect as the bright water in the original (odd since the sky is so dark).

Section Z: The guy is orange-ish ingame and purple-red in the cutscenes and red in the art.

Chaos Angels: If the system has a real bitmap mode (probably only fast enough for visual novels and the like), maybe Chaos Angels might look something like this. I didn't optimize the palette into little 8x8 chunks, because then I'd need to be clever and patient Doable though. 16 colors used here for both BG+FG.

Metroid: WIP. I'd like for the background here to be a clean black. Any background elements should be subtle and interactive. I don't quite like feeling like there's a world in the background that I can't access, so I'm probably not gonna do any faded blocks or so. Plant life is fine because it's organic and flowing, not looking like anything which can be stood on, and it exists right behind the foreground plane. As for enemies, I'd like them to have some more behaviors, giving them a life of their own. Simple behavior for humanoid enemies feel inappropriate because we expect a certain complexity from something human. It's less noticeable on "things", such as the popup cannons in Megaman 1, or maybe Metroid's limbless rippers. A Zoomer might stop and clean its mandibles like a fly. I'm thinking the Skree will only explode if it hits close to the player, otherwise it will waddle around like a bat and maybe jump.

...Couldn't resist adding some ancient Chozo machinery. I'm thinking these... invasive vacuum tolerant scalemail pancake corals came and grew all over the place, so I hid some gizmos inside the blocks.

The Turtles and Shadow of the Beast mockups highlighted some problems with missing values in the green ramp. Shadow of the Beast can't really be done with this palette because of the long desaturated ramps, so I made a saturated version with the same hues. However, it seems I don't have any ramps around the light gray.

Psycho Fox: I didn't have just the right orange for the fox, so I used light, shadow and saturated edge to give the surface some vibrancy, but ended up sort of breaking my color count limits in the process. Garbled terrain, still. I might refine it later. The dirt had some strange ultra yellow happening with no special texture (hints of a rhomboid?) so I didn't know where to take that. I'll have to redo.

Fantasy Star and Gods: Wanted to test the pastel range out here. I guess it sort of works. Gods made me realize that I needed another grayish color so I eventually made that (gray teal) but didn't use it much on the mockup. I failed to mix one with just dithering.

Wonderboy (Wondergirl): I didn't have the appropriate yellows so I did some dithering and buffering just so I could stay close to the color identity of the game. The blue hair is a homage to the skateboard helmet Wonderboy wears. I saw the original game in action on a cruise ship way back, and remember being very impressed by all the cool things which could happen in the game. I guess to a child's imagination a game can seem boundless like that. I redid some of the colors in V.6 so the mockup looks slightly better now.

Megaman (Megagirl): I dreaded doing this mockup because it's such an important game. I was dismayed that my V.5 palette lacked the correct flat blues, but by using a mix of light and shadow I could sort of approximate the colors. With 8 colors I don't need an extra sprite for the face, but I boldly added a ponytail which will be flailing about.

Shatterhand: Sloppy test to see what I could do with those oranges. Decided to hue shift a lot as I didn't have the exact original colors. Gave the guy a metal fist because he's all about punching stuff. I never actually played the game.

Bosconian: Just a bunch of greeble atm. I'm thinking the dreadnoughts whatever have modules attached which spew forth different threats. The early ones have more harmless modules and exposed cores.

Pinball An unfinished mockup of a Pinball board, based on Pinball Dreams' Nightmare/Graveyard. V.5 of the pal on this one, but it's all simple flats. It should probably be 320px wide. I used the width of the NES board here.