ZLG's Bonfire Emote
After knocking out an emote so quickly for HatBastion and his crew, I had Dark Souls on the mind and was looking for an opportunity to try out palette cycling in an animation. The first inspiration was the central figure of the games: the bonfire. It's on the loading screen, it's your respite against the Hollows, and it could serve as a break or rest time emote for the stream. I thought it was a great idea, so work began!
About Palette Cycling
"What is palette cycling?" one might ask. It's a technique where the pixels in an image don't change, but the assigned colors do. In older games, the graphics use what's called an indexed palette, where colors are stored in a table of numbers, and the image is represented by those color indexes instead. This reduces the space needed to store image data. When you do palette cycling, you're re-assigning the color indexes so that the image displays different colors, usually in a sequence of some kind. It's the animated form of a palette swap!
There are two ways to do this that are most obvious: the first is the repeating palette cycle. That's used in titles like Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, some of the Mega Man games, and more, usually to give the water and lava their dynamic feel, or to make energy weapon shots look otherworldly. The ramp cycles through its colors, and returns to the first color, which is usually much brighter/darker and a different hue.
The second palette cycling type is the mirrored, i.e. it ramps up, and then back down. This gives the colors a glowing, embery feel. Lots of lighting, and some weapon effects use this property, but it's usually used in places like animated tiles to reduce the number of tile updates. It was more present in older games where there was limited space to create a complicated engine or enough assets to achieve the look designers were going for.
Production
I used the mirrored palette cycling technique to build the bonfire emote. I started with a ramp from the deep red to the bright yellow and white, built the emote at its darkest, and then fiddled with the palette in ProMotionNG until it felt like it was a proper palette cycle that gave it the same glow the bonfire has on the loading screen in Dark Souls.
It's important that whatever image editing tool you have allows you to grab an entire selection of colors and re-assign their indexes live, so you can plan your art better. While I use GIMP for digital drawing, it's ill-suited for fine-tuned pixel or palette manipulation despite having extensive other image editing capabilities. ProMotionNG and GraphicsGale can do this sort of palette cycling with ease.
Something I added that other artists might not is two different cycle durations, so it isn't a uniform animation. One is slightly slower than the other, so it gives it more of a dynamic feel. I would have added a third speed to it, but I had trouble getting three variations that didn't feel same-y. I think two is a good compromise.
This is an emote that you can use on Twitch when you subscribe to my channel.