can't say I particularly deserved it for the most part, as I was either away from BYOND or acting like a troll.
I do have some form of project in the works, especially now that I can make music for the games (8-bit too), so I'll likely be doing something soon...
Speaking of 8-bit, it's merely limited to 8 colors a sprite, and 256 colors ever displaying at once? Can I use any combination of 256 colors I want, or is there a specific color palette?
"The system has an available color palette of 48 colors and 5 grays. Red, green and blue can be individually darkened at specific screen regions using carefully timed code. Up to 24 colors may be used on one scan line: a background color, four sets of three tile colors and four sets of three sprite colors. This total does not include color de-emphasis.
A total of 64 sprites may be displayed onscreen at a given time without reloading sprites mid-screen. Sprites may be either 8 pixels by 8 pixels, or 8 pixels by 16 pixels, although the choice must be made globally, as it affects all sprites. Up to eight sprites may be present on one scanline, using a flag to indicate when additional sprites are to be dropped. This flag allows the software to rotate sprite priorities, increasing maximum amount of sprites, but typically causing flicker."
Not a very simple answer, eh? One thing that should be apparent from the above quoted text is that your guess, about how many colors you can use, was way off. The NES couldn't display 256 colors total, nevermind on screen at any one time.
So how can you make a game that looks retro? Here's some simple guidelines to follow:
1. Use graphics that are 16x16px large.
2. Each graphic, whether a tile or sprite, can only use 4 colors, or 3 colors and transparency. [In other words, transparency is a color. You can't have a sprite with 4 colors and transparent regions.]
3. Use only 16 colors on screen at any one time.
4. Those 16 colors should be taken from a global, limited palette. A good palette to use is the standard one in the DM icon editor.
5. Limit the number of sprites (stuff moving around) on screen at any given time. The more stuff moving around, the less authentic it will look.
6. Don't stack things using layers. The NES could only display two layers, one for background tiles and one for sprites, and other hardware systems had similar restrictions. Having a lot of stuff stacked up increases the perceived number of colors in a tile.
Of those rules, the first three are the most important. Though these rules do not conform to any one system's exact restrictions, they do faithfully replicate an authentic and recognizable 8-bit style.