The VG Resource

8-Bit can be pretty hard sometimes. Only three colors you know. I'm attempting to Donkey Kong characters in 8-Bit but they don't seem quite... right. Any advice?

Perhaps you could use a somewhat darker shade of brown? it's kinda hard to see the red. Other than that, I don't see anything that looks terribly off.

Yeah, I'm not really so good at 8-Bits myself, but I also suggest using darker brown. Another point for 8-Bit spriting, is that there is only a single pallete, there is only one red and one brown colour, a red from Mario's cap and a brown from the body of a Goomba, however, I copied your sprites and tested them with the lighter and darker red and brown colours and they stll clash, unless you want the Kongs to be really light or the hats to be yellow or something I can't help. Although, Mario didn't have his modern day colours in 8-Bit so maybe you can give them lighter and darker colours. Just a thought :p

EDIT: Aha, just found a palette for the fur that might help,

RE 136
GREEN: 112
BLUE: 0

It's the hair colour of Mario, good luck

small color edit based on this nes palette I usually use


other than that it looks pretty good

Well, that one works pretty well, although wouldn't donkey kong series sprites be bst suited with a SMB palette, since those two series are closely related

Ugh, the contrast. I preferred the original palette to that one, but either way, the lineart/anatomy looks really good.

Yeah but I was wondering if it would look better with some lines separating the limbs.

There's not really room for doing that within the color limitations, unless you were to make the skin one color or such, and the outline a seperate color. Personally, I like it the way it is now. Lots of NES games had little distinction between body parts.

i dont think it needs an outline, at all.

An outline? Nah, hardly any 8-bits have outlines and if they did, they usually die into the black background of the games design :p

(04-15-2010, 11:29 PM)Koopaul Wrote: [ -> ]8-Bit can be pretty hard sometimes. Only three colors you know. I'm attempting to Donkey Kong characters in 8-Bit but they don't seem quite... right. Any advice?

Not bad. Although later NES games like the Megaman series had sprites (like Megaman) with 5 colours. I'm not entirely sure if Megaman was the only character in his series with 5 colours in his pallete, though.

(04-17-2010, 10:04 AM)PokeGyroid Wrote: [ -> ]Although later NES games like the Megaman series had sprites (like Megaman) with 5 colours. I'm not entirely sure if Megaman was the only character in his series with 5 colours in his pallete, though.

That was accomplished through having two sprite objects for the player - in the case of Megaman, the face was a separate object that was placed behind the rest of the sprite.

I think Koopaul is trying to avoid using that.

Good. I tried some AA to make it look a little better:

i dont think it needed AA at all either.

no, nether did I :/