Monday, April 29, 2013

Color signature

No, holidays are not boring

During my last vacation, I spent some time in NYC with my girlfriend, before sailing south for some great cruise in the eastern Caribbean. I took the opportunity to take some shots of Manhattan with my Galaxy Note from the Empire State Building observatory, knowing this would be useful for creating cities concepts for my game.

BTW if you've never been there, you should. The view is spectacular, and the city is awesome.

Then during the trip I used my Note to do some over paints, some of which I'd like to share with your now. These are coming straight from Sketchbook mobile on the Note.

The main goal here was to try to find some color signature for the game. I searched for a specific color range for each of the three main components of my game:
  1. The earth environment. Reflection of the desperation of the human race, crushed by the superior alien technology.
  2. The Aliens. The color palette, the shapes and silhouette all have to reflect the use of non earth technologies.
  3. The hero's biplane is a reflection of hope, and must be very different from the rest of the human items.
This one is my favorite. The aliens are aggressive and colorful, almost arrogant. They don't need to hide. They are a mixture of crustaceans and wasps, with their yellow stripes and dots and spiky silhouette. The background uses dimmed shades of orange, ocher and green. I think it reflects well the state of despair of the humans. The biplane is classic red and offers a good representation for hope.


The next one I find less interesting. I was trying to push further the background into ocher to give it a more distinctive look, but I think this is too much as it washes out any other color variation. I also tried to detail and cleanup the alien ship too much, and as such it doesn't leave enough space to imagination. The result is a little naive given the limited control one can have with the mobile tools, compared to say Photoshop.


This one I find also interesting. The background colors explore another palette, with more purples and oranges.  I quite like it. The ship is quite interesting in its shape and has some velvet like quality to the surface. It has a good balance between organic and technology. I will try to push this further in upcoming researches.  It's also a good candidate for experimenting with non traditional shaders for the ship's surface.


That's all for now. Your comments are always welcome.

2 comments:

  1. Hey, I heard some good news lately. Will you still have time to work on this game?

    Also, this will sound ridiculous, but if you need more manpower to port *this other project* (or any other one) to several platforms, I work for a small video game studio that develops for pretty much every platform - except handheld consoles and new-gen consoles - and we're always delighted to get new projects. I guess Fresh3D or AMA Studio or any of your students could do the same, but I had to take my chance.

    Also, I never took the time to tell you, but I love the last picture, that looks like some bacteria seen through a microscope.

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  2. Hi Guntha,

    Thanks for the nice comments. I'm trying to do my best to allocate enough time for each of my projects, it's not easy but it's also quite exciting. At least I'm not getting bored :)

    Regarding your proposal, I take note although right now we are not looking for extra manpower. Don't hesitate to directly contact AMA Studios to propose your services, as there are often more than one project in the pipe.

    Cheers,

    Franck.

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