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Well, I don't have any pseudocode for you, but a tip. If you want to darken a color and maintain its hue, you should convert that hex to HSB (hue, saturation, brightness) rather than RGB. This way, you can adjust the brightness and it will still look like the same color without hue shifting. You can then convert that HSB back to hex.
A hex colour such as #FCFCFC consists of three pairs representing RGB. The second part of each pair can be reduced to darken any colour without altering the colour considerably.
eg. to darken #FCFCFC, lower the values of C to give #F0F0F0
Reducing the first part of each pair by a small amount will also darken the colour, but you will start to affect the colour more (eg. turning a green to a blue).