When I started to make art for this team I had come from mostly working with paints and pencils. Pixel art was a new thing to me and even though I had read a lot of tips about it, I still had to learn many of the lessons the hard way while building these games. One of the more important lessons I learned was about how to choose the right colors for the art.
It has been a long time since the NES era with majorly limited color palettes and it can seem tempting to go use every color a monitor can generate to work with, but I have found that using a select color palette can solidify the tone of the art and give you a much better overall product. For example, compare these shots from Esque and Agent Blue.
Esque Agent Blue
While the lighting effects are more sophisticated in Esque, I would say that Agent Blue has a more cohesive art direction given that there is a limited range of colors to make up the base textures. Currently all sprite art for Agent Blue is being made using a modified NES color palette.
Agent Blue NES
I removed some of the more similar grays as well as added darker versions of all of various colors in place of the empty hex values. Every sprite I draw for this project uses only these colors and I have found that it has pushed my creativity when coming up with how to depict certain things, even if there are not enough colors to do it in a more traditional manner.
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