for fun last night, i decided to experiment with a thought i'd had this last week: NES-palette sonic characters using layered sprites for extra colors, a la the NES mega man games. i put a lot more thought into this than was wholly necessary; i'll put that all below a readmore.
the important things to note here are the NES only allocates room for 4 sprite palettes, all of which are 3 colors + a color slot hardcoded to be transparent, and the NES constructs objects out of 8x8 or 8x16 sprites. as an example: sonic's base layer, using a sprite palette of blue & red & white, could be made up of 6 8x8 sprites or 2 8x8 sprites and 2 8x16 sprites, with the latter being more optimal. his second layer, using a sprite palette all the second layers use of brown & tan & white, is a single 8x16 sprite.
as per my agenda, amy here is another attempt to make her design work without clothes, since the way only girls are required to wear clothes in the sonic universe has always bugged me as outdated and sexist. i think i did ok here, but obviously a ton of her visual identity gets lost when you nix her blouse and skirt, both in palette and in silhouette. i'm at least very happy with how her head came out!
further info and general blabbing below:
as mentioned, the NES only has support for 4 sprite palettes at once. i made these sprites under the assumption that only one character would be on-screen at any given time, so the first sprite palette is variable between the following:
- blue, red, white (sonic)
- orange, red, white (tails)
- green, red, white (knuckles)
- off-black, red, white (mighty)
- yellow, blue, white (ray)
- pink, blue, white (amy)
this helps keep the other palettes open. however, that second layer of sprites requires another palette be used for extra colors on the player characters. originally, i had a different skin tone for mighty separate from sonic & knuckles & amy, but i dropped that in favor of making the third color in that palette white so it could have wider use for other on-screen objects, such as dropped rings (rings placed in levels would be animated background tiles and use one of the background palettes instead, to save on the number of sprites on-screen). this setup would allow two open sprite palettes, which could be freely swapped out depending on what objects are within frame, which is something levels can be designed around.
tails, conveniently, doesn't need more than three colors for his character design to work, which means the second layer of sprites can be reserved for animating his tails separate from him when needed!
to close, here's some concessions i had to make given the palette and sprite-size limitations:
- i do feel like tails looks a little weird with the red as his darkest color; he's the only character here to do that. but i didn't want to made his red darker than anyone else's for consistency on the shoes... i could be persuaded to give that up, though
- i usually like to draw mighty's ears extending above the top of his shell, but if i'd done that, his secondary sprite would've been 8x17. juust out of bounds
- as mentioned, amy lost a lot in this transition. i wanted to keep her blue shoes (sort of, since her shoes are a much lighter blue normally), which resulted in her headband having to be blue. i think it works! but it's definitely different