| Ok, here we go, palettes.
It's quite a dirty word for everyone but it really isn't that
hard at all. This tutorial will be pretty short only because
there isn't much to it, the hardest part is drawing the image
and NOT using antialias or lens flare. LENS FLARE!11!!1
Remember: do all of this
BEFORE importing anything, and try and have all of your art
done already. |
| Okey doke, so the first
thing I'm going to do is draw a character, I'm going to use
the alien from my Spriting from a Scanned
Image tut to save me some time. |
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| This little guy is 15
colours including the background colour. So I want those 15
colours to be imported exactly as I drew them. The easiest
way I have found to do this is like so.
First, I have never understood
the whole idea behind importing a palette into AGS. It never
seems to work for me. So I came up with this little solution.
Take the image of the alien and make him 256 colours, save
him as a bmp or a pcx and then make him the background to
a room. Like this:
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Now, go to the palette
editor and unlock all the colours, I leave one locked just
so I can remember what the original colours are:
See those colours at
the bottom? Those are the images of my alien. Now just lock
all the colours but those:
There, now we have all
the colours of my alien imported. Now what ever room he
goes into he will look exactly as he should look and I got
to retain all my original colour.
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| And now, just apply this
technique to the rest of the game. Take all the images that
you want to set up a palette with and put them in the same image.
All your gui images and inventory images and character animations,
everything that has new colours, then follow the steps above
and BOOM, you set up a palette. |
| Other things to think
about:
o - When colouring backgrounds
and characters and all that. 256 colours is a lot of colours
it just takes some finesse to get the most out of them. Anti-Aliasing
will boost the amount of colours you used by insane degrees.
So just don't use them. In my opinion they only make things
harder, like colouring especially. |
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How many times have we
seen someone try colouring an object that they drew with
anti-aliased lines and it ended up something like this:
Also, that image right
there is 192 colours... That's just crazy.
If I do it right I end
up with this:
Which is over 256 colours...
Not a smart decision to use this in a game.
Granted there are tricks
you can do to optimize, like getting rid of the AA between
the outline and the background and then reducing the colours
to 8, and this is what I got:
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| o - When drawing backgrounds
especially, if you have photoshop or psp or some program that
allows for multiple images to be open at once, open them all
up when doing a new background, or keep a smaller image with
all the colours you have used so far. This helps to keep the
colour count down because you won't accidentally use a slightly
different purple or something. Or just make a new palette
if you want to in PSP or PS.
I've made this collection
of colours:
It's from a game I'm working
on, it's all the colours that appear in every background and
character and object in the game, 77 colours so far, including
the background. I used this as a reference for colour choosing.
Later, when I'm done colouring everything, I can just use
this image as my palette by following the steps above. |
| o - Always
draw with the knowledge that you are making a 256 palettized
game. Don't draw it in 16 bit and then reduce the colours.
It could end up looking fine but chances are it's not always
going to work out for you like that. |
| o - Like I said before,
256 colours is a lot of colours. I think the most colours I've
ever had in a background were 114. That means that I have 142
unique colours I can use for my characters, objects, or guis. |
| o - Never ever ever
ever use lens flare. Never. And never use the plug-ins that
"simulate" lighting. |
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If there are any more
questions, please feel free to ask me. Palettes aren't that
hard once you get the hang of them. You just have to think
a little bit more about what you are doing. So I hoped this
helps.
eric
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