Visual Style
Caves of Qud's in-game art employs a restricted visual style that can generally be described as follows:
- The palette is limited to 18 specific colors.
- Each tile (sprite) can have up to three colors: foreground, detail, and background. (The background color is usually left as the default black; see the Palette section.)
- Each tile is 16 pixels wide by 24 pixels tall.
Additionally, composite screens, art pieces in its style, and the game itself employ:
- a vignette effect, darkening the corners of the screen slightly.
- a scanline effect, emulating the look of images on an old CRT TV by superimposing faint, horizontal lines over the image.
- a desaturation effect, moving all displayed colors slightly closer to grey.
The viginette and scanline effects can be disabled in the options menu.
Some art in the game doesn't strictly follow the limited palette, and employs a unique trick (see: Modding: Tiles#4th Color) to create a theoretically infinite palette as long as the color produced can be created by mixing two of the 18 pre-defined colors.
Palette
Caves of Qud's palette comprises 18 specific “ideal” colors (before any screen effects), given in the following table:
Code | Name | Hex | |
---|---|---|---|
r | dark red / crimson | #a64a2e | █ |
R | red / scarlet | #d74200 | █ |
o | dark orange | #f15f22 | █ |
O | orange | #e99f10 | █ |
w | brown | #98875f | █ |
W | gold / yellow | #cfc041 | █ |
g | dark green | #009403 | █ |
G | green | #00c420 | █ |
b | dark blue | #0048bd | █ |
B | blue / azure | #0096ff | █ |
c | dark cyan / teal | #40a4b9 | █ |
C | cyan | #77bfcf | █ |
m | dark magenta / purple | #b154cf | █ |
M | magenta | #da5bd6 | █ |
k | #0f3b3a | █ | |
K | dark grey / black | #155352 | █ |
y | grey | #b1c9c3 | █ |
Y | white | #ffffff | █ |
Palette File for Pixel Art
Copy the following text block into Notepad or another plain text editor and save the file as Caves of Qud.pal
. Then you can import it into a pixel art program such as Piskel or Aseprite.
JASC-PAL 0100 18 166 74 46 215 66 0 241 95 34 233 159 16 152 135 95 207 192 65 0 148 3 0 196 32 0 72 189 0 150 255 64 164 185 119 191 207 177 84 207 218 91 214 15 59 58 21 83 82 177 201 195 255 255 255