OVERVIEW:

Old game consoles used palette indexing to color sprites which contributed heavily to their aesthetic.

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With palette indexing, sprites don't contain any color values, just color indices.

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The NES, for example, could display eight three-color palettes and a background color for a total of 25 colors at once. The Super Star effect in Super Mario Bros. was created by having Mario's sprite quickly cycle through six of the eight color palettes.

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The character shown above is using the same technique. Ironically, recreating this effect in a modern engine is almost impractical - without palette indexing, faithfully mimicking Mario's Super Star effect from the NES would require hundreds of sprite sheets and some sort of giant table.

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One reason I made Echodream was my desire for an engine that could do palette indexing. Unlike the old consoles, Echodream isn't limited to palette indexing - it can also render textures directly without using color palettes. But I wanted the ability to faithfully recreate the retro aesthetic, so I made an engine and toolset that could.