Thanks for all the helpful posts, guys! I have an update and I've figured a few ways to do both, create 8-bit images and 8-bit music/sound loops. For the 8-bit Images, I used photoshop and started a new document and the sprite was around 45x30(height x length) and my palette is automatically 8-bit. I don't quite get this though "4 colors included the transparance color, so you have only 3 colors for a sprite." And for my 8-bit music, I'm using FamiTracker. Fun stuff!
Transparency counts as a colour, so you can have red, green, blue and then transparency as the 4th, but if you want to add another colour you have to fill up the entire 45x30 area with it. Or think of it this way, many programs use pink as the transparent colour, so anything you paint pink will be invisible when put into the game: So you only get 4 colours, and pink (transparent) counts as one of them.
Hmm... that is a bit confusing. I understand what you're saying, but I thought 8-bit could have at most 256 colours? What makes the sprite any different? The sprite is the moving character, right? My guess is that the background can have up to 256 colours, but the sprite can only have 4? Jeez, I thought I have played 8-bit games where the sprite/character had at least 10 colours.
You're confusing 8-bit graphics with 8-bit systems. 8-bit usually refers to computers of the 8-bit era. These were classics like Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum etc. If I recall correctly, C64 had a palette of 12 colors in total. Spectrum had seven colors. And that means all games ever made on those systems only used those same colors. When you refer to 8-bit images, computer hardware was mostly 16-bit or 32-bit before they were powerful enough to handle 8-bit color palettes. So if you're trying to create an authentic "retro 8-bit" game, you actually need to create 4-bit graphics for it
Thanks so much for the information. I guess, if I was to create images for a game, and I wanted it to be a relatively small size file, I would make sure to only use, say, 20 colors in the whole game. All I need to know now, is how to create animations of 8-bit images in Photoshop... EDIT: I figured it out. My one problem is that I have to change the color of the background to see the pixel grid, and I have no idea how to do it.
I found some useful information for finding pixel art information, if anyone is interested. Great forum, too. http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/index.php?PHPSESSID=39b36d6229d2bc9cbae705ae3a4a76fc&topic=4265.0
