Color and Palettes at Low Resolution

At 32×32 you don't have room for many colors — and that constraint is the style. This doc gets you to one decision: your game's palette, chosen on purpose.

Why limited palettes win#

• Basic Color Theory (article, saint11) — hue, saturation, value at pixel scale; why pure black shadows fall flat.
• Pixelblog 1: Color Palettes (article, Slynyrd) — building a palette ramp by hand in HSB, step by step. The single most practical palette tutorial anywhere.

Core idea to walk away with — hue shifting: shadows aren't darker versions of a color, they're darker and shifted (usually toward blue/purple); highlights shift toward yellow/warm. Once you see it, you can't unsee it in every good pixel game.

Picking a palette (don't roll your own yet)#

• Lospec palette list (database) — the community standard. Filter by color count; download as a file your editor imports directly.
• Proven starting points for a cozy top-down game: search Lospec for Resurrect 32, Endesga 32, or AAP-64. Constrain first, customize later — a published palette teaches you relationships your own first palette won't have.

Dithering — a warning label#

Dithering (checkerboard color mixing) looks impressive and is mostly wrong at 32×32 — the texture reads as noise at small sprite sizes. Learn what it is via Lospec's beginner tag, use it sparingly for skies and large gradients, and not on your farmer.

Do this now#

Pick one palette from Lospec. Import it into your editor. Redraw one of your fundamentals exercises in it. That palette is now the game's palette — write its name in your project notes, and change it later only on purpose, all at once.