Game Engines and palette effects

[puggsoy]

Actually, there are a lot of pre-made game engines for most common programming languages, which handle just about everything. As long as you don't try to do anything too out of bounds it can practically be like Game Maker without a GUI, actually. The only difference is that you can make slight differences in the code to suit your needs, which in this case you could do with the main character's code to allow palette cycling.

That would only require a basic knowledge of the programming language and a bit about how the engine is put together, but you would by no means need to build the entire engine from scratch.