I like the idea of being able to change the colors on a sprite.
Approach #1
1. Create one version of your sprites
2. Use scripts to change color.
Problem with this approach. As far as I can tell the way to change the sprite color applies a blending algorithm with the new color. The guy in this example gets some decent results, but its not quite perfect he doesn't really look like the reference image, and his whites are blending by a lot. Maybe there are a few options here to tweak but I'm not sure if you get the control you want very easily?
http://unikronsoftware.com/2dtoolkit/forum/index.php/topic,1924.msg9505.html#msg9505This approach is nice because you can make the sprite animations once.
Approach #2
1. Create a different sprite for each color (Either doing this manually in photoshop or some sort of external script of your own modifying your sprite sheets (I imagine a replace sprite color/flood fill thing might not be to hard to write a python script for).
2. Create a separate sprite collection and animations for each other.
The problem with this seems to be that you need to create new sprite collections and animations multiple times (maybe a lot depending on how many colors you use). But you get a bit better control over how the sprites will look.
I like option 2, but I wonder if there is a workflow to make adding the different color sprites a bit easier? Maybe if I make the animations once, copy them and just toggle the sprite collection this would work? If I keep separate sprite collections for each color and keep sprites with the same names?
I'm just wondering what has worked well in practice for other users?
Edit:
Approach #3
Maybe there is a plugin to change the way colors get modified and I could create an in game way to write my own find and replace colors on tk2d sprites. Does something like this exist?