How to Make Custom Palettes for Mega Knockdown

A guide to customizing character colors in Mega Knockdown

The Color Swap Shader

Hi, this is a quick guide to how to make custom colors for Mega Knockdown. As the dev I will give some added context into how this works.

In the finished sprites we actually use two layered images per frame of animation. One has only lineart and shadows with a standard sprite shader, then a second sprite contains only flat shades of gray which is run through a swap shader (written for us by TooMuchAbstraction, the developer of Waves of Steel).


Before rendering a sprite set up for color swapping, this shader reads the intensity (lightness/darkness) of its pixels. Each shade of gray maps to different color within a palette texture, and the shader assigns that color. Then to change character color palettes we just switch palette textures. Each of those is just an 8x1 pixel image, so they're easy to make and edit!

Accessing the Palette Files

Open your Mega Knockdown install directory, then navigate to the Mega Knockdown_Data\StreamingAssets\Palettes subfolder. You should see a "Default" folder that has the default palette textures, and an empty "Override" folder. So for Paul, first copy the palettes from Default\Paul into Override\Paul.


After copying sprites into the Override\(Character) folder you can just use any image editor to edit the palette pngs. They are only 8x1 pixels across so you will likely need to zoom in a lot to see the individual pixels. Changing any one of those pixels changes the color which is assigned to different parts of the "Tones" layer of a sprite, with no effect on the lineart or shadows.

Using Your Custom Palettes

After editing the palette files above, launch the game. If you followed the instructions above correctly, your custom colors will appear in game. If you ever want to revert your changes, you can just delete your customized palettes and the game will go back to usIng the default.

"I'm the joker, baby!"

Currently this is just a client-side change, meaning your custom colors won't show up for online opponents, but if you show off your custom colors on our Discord[discord.com] or on the Steam community, we might add the best ones directly into the game!