Is it.. exactly? Like I wanted? No. I WANTED to use UI tookit to make buttons that displayed the color and HEX code, and when pressed, open up a small palette picker window. For some reason, making custom stuff like that that requires binding to serialized properties is NOT possible – or at least, not EASY – in the editor. HOWEVER, making a custom Palette attribute and a property drawer works in a similar way.

using a single integer value, the palette attribute splits it into a luminosity value (left, 0-3) and a hue value (right, 0-15) that match up with the NTSC NES color palette. This leads to a much more intuitive way of picking colors over typing the index by text only.

I’ve also done a bit to separate map, graphics, and character systems so I can build them out individually- I’ll need to make a proper unity based tool for making parcel data, since using tiled is pretty cumbersome at the moment. using UI toolkit for that should be a bit easier, since I can use window logic to deal with data binding.

for now at least, each parcel has a desired attribute included so each individual object can have it’s own palette across all it’s tiles! After some finagling with color correction for my map shader, it’s looking a lot better – though I may need to search for better base palette data, as the one I have is a bit strong.