VIBES: ██████████ 100%
Spent the week perfecting the 17-color palette + smoothing shader pipeline. It's a game changer — the art reads as pixel art up close but has this beautiful painterly quality at distance.
The palette itself took longer than expected to nail down. I kept wanting more colors — there's always one more shade of brown that would be useful — but the constraint is the point. Forcing everything through 17 colors creates coherence. Every asset feels like it belongs to the same world because it literally is built from the same materials.
The smoothing shader was the unlock. Without it, pixel art at game-screen scale has this jagged, aliased quality that can read as "unfinished" to players who aren't expecting it. The shader applies a very subtle sub-pixel smoothing pass that preserves the character of each pixel at 1:1 zoom but blends edges gracefully when scaled. The result is art that reads as intentional and deliberate at any resolution.
Wrote up the full process in my notes. Might share it as a tutorial eventually — there's not much documentation out there on this specific approach, and it took me a few weeks of iteration to get right.
Also: accidentally made a train sprite that looks like a caterpillar. I was going for "chunky industrial locomotive" and landed somewhere between a centipede and a caterpillar. Keeping it. It has personality.