16×16 Chest — Object Example
How a treasure chest fits an object into 16×16: box-plus-lid construction, wood and metal material separation, and shading that implies an openable lid.
palette · 6 colors
01Two boxes, one object
The chest is a lid box stacked on a body box, with a 1px shadow line at the seam. That seam line is what makes it read as openable — the most important single pixel row in the sprite.
02Material separation by color family
Wood uses warm browns, the metal band cool grays. The two never share a ramp step, so material boundaries read even in silhouette. Warm-vs-cool contrast is doing the work outlines would normally do.
03Top face tells the light
The lid's top face carries the lightest wood tone; the front face steps down; the right side steps down again. Three visible faces, three values — enough for the object to sit in space without any cast shadow.
04Animation hook
Open-chest animations keep the body box and redraw only the lid (rotated up, then hidden). Because the design is two boxes, the 'open' state is a 2-frame edit, not a redraw.
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