Crimson Zeal <> The Merchant WL (GTD)

THE CONSTRAINT Every bit is a 24×24 grid resolved to at most sixteen colours. Four bits per pixel — hence the name. That ceiling isn't nostalgia. At sixteen colours you cannot render your way out of a problem; you have to compose. There's no room for soft gradients, no anti-aliasing to hide a bad silhouette, no texture to cover a weak shape. Every trait has to read at twenty-four pixels across or it doesn't ship. A hat that only works at 512px is not a hat, it's a smudge. It also means the whole collection is small enough to verify by hand. Nothing is hiding in the resolution.