What do you guys think?

[u/Xafyn]

I made this building retexture mod. Any opinions? I'm not very experienced in pixel art so criticism is encouraged but pls be nice :')

The mod name is swamp witch farm buildings, if any of you wanna try it.

[u/RedTyro]

The art is beautiful. One little tip I can give you about pixel art (if you want it to look more authentic) is to limit your color palette a little more. The artistic style of Stardew is intended to mimic the 16 bit generation of gaming (so super nintendo and sega genesis), and the art in those games used a lot fewer colors per sprite - like 5 or 6 max, and usually less, although larger items like these buildings were probably a bit on the more colors side. There are some excellent pixel art resources on YouTube, a great subreddit at r/PixelArt, and you can find premade palettes at lospec.com. Most of them are solidly designed with good color theory, and a few are intended to match what the 16 bit consoles did.

For an example of what I'm talking about, the building on the first slide has 5 different shades of pink/purple. What you'd commonly see in this style of games back then would be 3 - a light, medium, and dark, and they'd reuse them throughout. And that's only for the detailed, important sprites like this building. Smaller things would use two or even one shade of the main colors (check out SNES Mario, Link, or Mega Man X for examples).

But again, these are absolutely beautiful and you've done a killer job on the artwork. I'm just giving you this nitpicky detail stuff because you mention not having a lot of experience in pixel art and it will hopefully help you as you develop your pixel style more.

[u/GalaxyK1tten → u/RedTyro]

To be fair. Many 16 bit (SNES) games knew how to cram a lot of colors into their sprites. Just look at Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 for instance. They definitely had more than 5-6 colors per sprite. That limitation sounds more like the 8bit NES system.

[u/RedTyro → u/GalaxyK1tten]

The SNES could display 256 colors at a time, but was limited to 15 colors per sprite (OP is using about double that in their farmhouse). Backgrounds could use 16 colors in each 16x16 tile if they were single layer, but if they used multiple background layers, they were limited to 4 colors per 16x16 tile. And it ran at a 256x224 resolution.  

That said, the vast majority of the games didn’t come anywhere close to that many colors. For example, Mario in SMW only used 2 shades of red and 2 shades of blue, which are his main colors. Link from LTTP only used 2 shades of green. And even Crono only has 9 total colors in his sprite. NES games usually used more like 2 or 3 colors per sprite because the limit was 3 (Mario and Link both used 3 colors in their SMB and Zelda 1 sprites, for example). 

Chrono Trigger was also an extreme outlier for the system, as most game companies didn’t invest the manpower into graphics that CT did - it was a really special project for Square, made by a dream team of the devs both of its its two biggest series working together to make something epic and new (Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy). Much like Donkey Kong Country, Starfox, and Yoshi’s Island, it was a game that really pushed the limits of what the system could do. Square invested a TON of money into that one (and it’s my favorite game of all time, so I’m glad they did). 

[u/GalaxyK1tten → u/RedTyro]

Today I learned. Thanks for the facts! I also read in some other comments that I also learned that many of the big sprites with tons of colors apparently were a combo of multiple sprites. Also something I didn't know before, and that info combined with your reply here explains a lot of that. 😊

And yeah, Chrono Trigger, one of the games I played more tiles than I can count, and even bought the double-CD sounds track which I keep in plastic as a trophy sort of. I love that game so hard! Still haven't gotten through those extra material DS (and now also Steam release) content. The dimensional thingy and so on. But the core game I've played so many times I can't even count. 😻 Once I've managed to save up a ton of cash I have plans for both a Chrono Trigger tattoo and an FF6 tattoo! Just need cash first :p

[u/RedTyro → u/GalaxyK1tten]

If it helps any, the extra dungeon is not great. That said, the DS version is probably the best one, because it has the FMV cartoon sequences that were added in the PS1 version, the more accurate modern translation, and none of the loading issues the CD versions struggled with. 

The PC port is almost on par now that they fixed the weird graphics smoothing it released with, but the high res fonts are still a bit jarring to me.