retro-pixel

Start by selecting a color budget (grayscale, minimal, small, or medium) that fixes your screen size and colors per tile. Then declare a palette with one common ink color plus material-based sub-palettes in three shades, and generate the art with code using fixed seeds rather than hand-placing pixels.

Use one common blue-black ink color plus several material-based sub-palettes (water, plants, earth, stone) with three shades each: dark, mid, and light. Avoid pure black #000000 and pure sRGB primaries, keep saturation low, and reserve white for highlights and accents.

Do not apply these rules to high-definition painted backgrounds or shader-based surfaces, where pixel budgets would lower quality. Also defer to a visual style guide if the art direction is not yet decided, since this Skill covers technique after the pixel art decision is made.

Flat results usually come from single-layer compositions, uniform pattern density, or filling regions with texture instead of layering objects over ground. Use at least three depth layers, vary pattern density by location, and let ground show between objects.

Concentrate pixels on the face and head, using 2-3 head-body proportions for characters 16-32px tall with one or two distinguishing features like hair or a hat. For faces over 48px, add pupils, nose definition, lip lines, and hair strands rather than solid blocks.

Avoid nine documented anti-patterns including single-color triangle mountains, checkerboard object placement, uniform white outlines, evenly spaced dots, straight-line framing, texture-filled regions, and exceeding your declared color budget mid-project.