Hello I am Sanjay Pasari, I'm making a 2D metroid-style game and have spent a lot of time getting my color palette just right. I'd like to add some lighting/filters/atmospheric effects, but I'm worried that they will skew my palette and make things look off. What sorts of lighting and atmospheric effects do you recommend that won't screw up my color palette, if any?
If you want to preserve hue, anything that only affects brightness and saturation. Fog and haze, but also lights, if their colors have no hue.
But that's just theory ofc. If you make some yellow dark, it may become some ugly brownish or greenish mess regardless.
Seems you already use some fog for the background. I would say just try things out and choose what looks good.
Something which might work well is to play around with global illumination, ideally caused from large but not too bright area lights.
This gives subtle gradients, which helps depth perception and looks harmonic, so it works well for backgrounds.
The only detail i'd criticize in the image is the pink GUI bar top right. The pink conflicts with the red rocket symbol, and since the rest of the image is dominated by red, i would replace the pink with red eventually.
It's currently quite trendy to use a tint right between red and pink, complemented with some greenish cyan. Seen in games like CP2077 or Ruiner, and other Cyberpunk games.
That's already overused imo, but good examples of achieving a distinctive look from color palettes. So maybe you can get some inspiration from such games.