iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 21/07/2026

there's a lot goin on here (sorry about the discord notif while i was recording) #indiegame #pixelart #platformer #gamedev

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 12/02/2026

if you've forgotten your ice axe, a penguin's beak will still work! 🐧 #pixelart #gamedev #indiedev #platformer

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 04/02/2026

wow, these speedy sections are fun. it's almost as if you could make a whole game out of this... #pixelart #gamedev #indiedev

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 29/01/2026

platformers never use ceilings in fun ways and i've had enough of that 🙃 #pixelart #indiedev #gamedev

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 21/09/2025

pssst..... hey... the Soda-Powered Penguin SAGE '25 demo is out now! the entire demo has been brought to a new visual standard thanks to @magipixel.bsky.social !! #indiedev #gamedev

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 19/09/2025

maybe i'm milking it but i do think the 2025 version of this room looks infinitely better #pixelart #indiedev #leveldesign

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 19/09/2025

i still can't believe how good all of the new art looks now, it's surreal #pixelart #indiedev #gamedev

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 19/09/2025

i couldn't quite finish putting the full palette article into the new sage demo in time 😔 i need to rest but this is the first thing i'll do when i wake

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 03/09/2025

🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin will return... September 19th for SAGE 2025!

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 08/08/2025

Soda-Powered Penguin in the penguin colony in antarctica 🐧 I can't express how awesome it was of lenny from the discord to do this :) #pixelart

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

texture sizes do have limits though, whether you're using the RGBA32 color format or just the single-color channel R8 color format. so... how about we combine multiple R8 color indexed textures into a single RGBA32 texture? each R8 texture could occupy a different color channel after all!

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

so, after the game engine imports an image into a texture, we'll overwrite that texture data with the color indexed texture data! and, while we're at it, we could actually use a single-color channel texture format too! this reduces the texture file size by 75%

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

image file formats, like .JPG or .PNG, often use compression to shrink the image size. this compression may involve breaking up the image into multiple grids of colors!

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

so, technically speaking, images are not textures. shaders only accept textures, not just any image type. a texture is a single grid of colors.

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

once again, we'll turn to shaders to automate this process! this is actually just the first part of the "Find and Replace All" shader- but instead of outputting a swapped color, we just output index "i" converted to a color!

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

this raises a new question: how do we create these color-indexed textures? doing it by hand is certainly not an option. like the original recolor-by-hand approach, you'd need to throw out your work and start again every time you make a change to the original image.

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

since we only need one color index per pixel, we actually only need to use just one color channel- red- to store the color indices! so, the shader to convert color indices back to RGBA colors should look something like this:

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

so, instead of using an image to represent color data, we should instead use images to represent color index (position) data. textures use a different RGBA format than shaders, where each color channel value can be 0-255. this is automatically converted to 0.0-1.0 in the shader.

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

the answer, as it turns out, is that the NES stores RGBA values externally! the 2-bit value is used as a position on the palette, allowing colors to be represented with less data!

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

old game systems didn't have this performance caveat, so they're doing something different to achieve the palette swap effect. especially since the NES only defined colors with 2 bits- so that sprites could only have 4 colors total!

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

this shader is good for sprites with a handful of colors! unfortunately, this shader is too limited for swapping a whole level's visuals. the penguin's palette consists of 6 colors, but the level palette will have at least 36. shaders run for every pixel on every frame, so performance matters!

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

we'll iterate through this set of colors with index position "i". 1. if the color matches source color at position "i", then output the corresponding swap color at position "i". 2. if the color doesn't match, then add 1 to "i" and go back to step 1

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

so, instead, it'd make more sense to define a set of "source" colors and a set of "swap" colors- that way we can change as many colors as we want!

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

devs will often call the palette swap feature finished here, as this is about as good as visual scripting tools can do. this is fine for games with limited palette swaps! but remember, i want to swap the palette of a whole level, so i need to build a more robust system.

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

this enables changing any singular color on the sprite. if we wanted to change more colors, we could chain the logic of this shader:

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

so: shaders are the best tool to accomplish palette swapping! we'll start with a basic "Find and Replace" shader. If the pixel's color matches the "source" color, then the shader will render the "swap" color instead of the original color.

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

in short: shaders are GPU programs that use data from "materials" in order to render (draw) images! here's the default shader most game engines have- and here's exactly where you see the "tint" color multiplication!

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

in order to get a properly palette-swapped sprite, we'll need to look into how sprites are drawn on the screen. the important part of this process is the shader, which i promise to break down in an easy-to-understand way!

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

since color component values can only be between 0.0 and 1.0, this means that the product of color multiplication will always result in something that's darker than either starting color. this explains why "tint" never provides a satisfactory result! (it is useful for transparency at least!)

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

with a numerical representation of colors, this means that color math is possible- like color multiplication! in order to get the product of two colors, you'd multiply each of the color components together. X(Rx, Gx, Bx, Ax) × Y(Ry, Gy, By, Ay) = Z(Rx × Ry, Gx × Gy, Bx × By, Ax × Ay)

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Domo 🐧 Soda-Powered Penguin @domo-yoro.games · 17/07/2025

in order to explain why, we need to talk about RGB! RGB is a color model to represent colors via Red, Green, and Blue colors. the lights blend together additively to create the colors you see! the values for the lights are between 0.0-1.0, which means that colors are represented with numbers!

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