Alternate Costumes & Color Separation
One of the interesting aspects of HD fighting game sprites is the ability to recolor characters in more dynamic ways for their alternate costumes/palettes. In the past, games had restrictive color counts because of technical limitations, so that meant a character’s alternate palettes could only use the same number of colors as their default look.
No longer weighed down by such restrictions, hard drawn 2D fighting games like The King of Fighters XIII and Skullgirls could change up how their alternate palettes were handled.
Skullgirl's Brian Jun explains the process behind creating these complex alternate costumes over on their official website, if you'd like to learn more. I have to imagine that KOF XIII's designers utilized a similar process of their alternate costumes.
The first time I ever noticed this sort of technique being used was in the Street Fighter III∶ New Generation. Unlike his default outfit, some of Sean’s alternate costumes have pants that’re differently colored from his tops.
(For whatever reason, none of the other characters in the Street Fighter III series receive alternate palettes utilizing color separation.)
This design technique appears to be pretty popular within the M.U.G.E.N. community and I’m almost positive that they’re responsible for coming up with the term “color separation”.
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