[jkbyc]

You might enjoy an entire talk on using a limited color palette for graphics in early games and how it stimulated creativity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

"In this GDC 2016 talk, Terrible Toybox's Mark Ferrari discusses and demonstrate some of his techniques for drawing 8 bit game graphics, including his celebrated methods for use of color cycling and pallet shifting to create complex and realistic background animation effects without frame-animation

GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every weekday. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives."

[vanderZwan]

And a direct link to the canvas cycling demo mentioned in the talk, as well as the blog describing it and a Q&A with Mark Ferrari:

http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/

http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article-Old_School_Color_C...

http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article-Q_A_with_Mark_J_Fe...

Sadly, Joe Huckaby (who implemented the web-based demo) never got around to finish the promised drawing tool. I wonder if any other pixel art programs since then have added interface support for color cycling.

[agys]

Thank you for sharing this incredible talk! Mark captures one of the main topics in art making perfectly: the power of limitations.

Also: “The environment was small enough that you could actually think about it”