SIXTEEN COLORS IS PLENTY

Last winter I spent two weeks rebuilding the color ramp for CINDER HOLLOW and threw most of it away. The build I shipped runs on the same brown-orange and dark-navy I had on day one. Everything I added in between just made the dungeon look like a stock-photo sunset.

CONSTRAINT IS THE WHOLE GAME

A fixed palette forces every decision to mean something. When you only get sixteen entries, the orange you reserve for torchlight cannot also be the orange you waste on a UI border. You start treating each hue like a key on a controller — finite, deliberate, mapped to one job.

"If a color does two things, it does neither one well."

So I dithered. Ordered checkerboard fills did the gradient work that a true-color blend would have flattened into mush. The grime on a cellar wall is just two browns shuffled at the pixel level, and at viewing distance your eye does the mixing for free.