I'm currently working on a 2D god game. I'm a programmer first, but since I don't really have a budget to hire an artist I'm doing all the sprites myself. I've had some godawful colors (think everything fully saturated), so recently I did a little bit of reading on selecting colors and came up with a palette. Anyway, my strategy is to use less saturated colors for terrain and more saturated colors for game objects, to make them easy to spot for gameplay purposes, but I'm concerned the saturation difference just doesn't look very good. I'm also been looking at my own artwork so long that I have zero objectivity on it's quality. So yeah, I could use some outside opinion on whether my artstyle is serviceable or whether it'd turn away potential players.  Pointing out specific mistakes I'm making with colors and sprite detailing would be great. The UI is just a placeholder, but I'm not sure on whether it should be using terrain or objects palette when I make a proper one, so any opinions on that are also welcome. And yes, I plan on doing some kind of tile transitions eventually, but it's on the backburner right now.

Anyway, here's a couple of screenshots:

And here's my palette (objects left, terrain right):

looks good

I think having more saturated colors to help your objects stand out is a great idea!  I can see them very clearly and your overall design is appealing as well. 
Personally I would try the terrain palette with the UI first and see if I liked it.  Sometimes high saturation can be hard on the eyes, I think. 
I like what you have so far and I think you're on the right track!   Wishing you good luck with your game!  :)

Ha! I'm also making a kind of similar survival stone age game and was having problems with the colour palette too. I tried the DB32 palette, but then went back to my own palette, because it feels more like my game and I could learn sth.

I like the colours on your screenshots alot, and also the sprites. Top down view art can be really hard sometimes. Keep doing what you are doing! :)

Your colors are absolutely fine -  I specifically like the one for the UI and the people.

i likey

Hey the art itself looks great but I think you are using too many colors which in turn will make it harder to have objects stand out since you will invariably have more noise.

An example of this would be if you look at your left and rightmost columns for each palette, the near white colors are mostly identical, you could simply do with 1 or maybe 2 white colors. The dark shades all have too much overlap as well, if you selectively remove some of them you will actually have color groups that nicely blend in with each other which then creates more cohesion.

If you need some examples I'd be happy to draw one up for you. (do not have access to my drawing tools right now)
Hope this helped and I look forward to seeing more of your game, it looks promising :)

Thanks for all the positive feedback :)

donvermo, I've noticed what you're saying,  but I'm not quite sure how to fix it. My knowledge of color theory is very basic (read an article or two), so I mostly picked colors using consistent deltas between hue, saturation and value, and I find myself not using a lot of these colors. But I'm not sure how to otherwise construct ramps without having the colors clash. So yeah, it'd be great if you have the time edit my palette to show me what exactly you mean, and link me to a good article that explains why and how you changed it. Thanks :)

Anyway, another thing I'm concerned with is that my animations have very low FPS. I simply don't have time to make smooth animations, art is more work than I anticipated :/ Do y'all think I could get away with treating this as a stylistic choice, or does it just make the game look unpolished? Sample animations:

And just for the hell of it, here's another screenshot featuring actual leaves on my trees & shrubs (original post screenshots were in in-game January):

And yes, that's 27 FPS on a Ryzen running a 2D game LOL. But it's still a long way to release, and I do plan to optimize.

If the game is fun, then the crude animations won't bother me at all. Also it's obvious that you put time and effort into the art, don't worry about it. Maybe polish later in development if you feel the need.

Hey game looks cool so far!  

If you want a play tester i'll help you out.

One thing from looking at your first screen shot - It was not  straight away obvious that the people were people, they seemed like part of the terrain at first glance to me.  

I'm sure when they are moving its a lot more obvious and top down people are hard to draw right in my (limited) experience.  

How long you been working on the game for?