Hello everyone, and welcome back to the VV Eekly Update. It’s me, your host for this week… Shrubb! Surprise, surprise – what a great change from previous weeks.
For this week, I want to share some thoughts and show you some work I’ve been doing on palettes for Vyn and Verdan. I’ll tell you about why I think a strong palette is so important to the art direction for this game, and I’ll show you my palette board that I’ve been using as inspiration.
Art Skills (Or Lack Thereof)
It may be obvious already, but I’m not a particularly strong artist. I’m largely a programmer who only vaguely dabbles in sketches and line art. However, a game needs strong visuals! It’s a conundrum.
A lot of previous game developers have tackled a lack of art skill in one of two ways. First, use only pixel art. Pixel art is relatively cheap to make, but nonetheless can be expressive even at low resolutions. However, I’m personally pretty tired of the pixel art style. In addition, even if I wanted to do pixel art, I don’t think I could match up to the very well done pixel art of modern indie games. In a slightly related area, indie devs working on realistic world graphics are judged just as harshly as AAA game companies, which is a losing battle. I don’t want my art to be compared to good pixel art.
The second way game devs have tackled the lack of art skill is to use only abstract shapes. Think rectangles and triangles like in classic puzzle games, in strong colors and lots of particle effects. This leans more on post-processing effects like lighting, screen effects like vignette color, and manipulations of basic shapes like squeezing. This certainly has an appeal to me as a programmer (that would be so much easier than drawing!), but I can’t communicate the forest-y vibe of the game like I would want to. I want to be cute!
And so, I’ve chosen to go a third route. It may be a mistake, but, especially as a first game with lower expectations, I’m willing to take some risks to see what I can accomplish. I haven’t been able to find a name for it, but I think of it as “t-shirt art”.
Palettes
T-shirt art is typically blocks of strong colors in a very limited palette. In the context of printing on a t-shirt, more colors is more ink to set up, and so artists have to be creative in how to use their limited palette.
You can see why choosing the right palette is so important. You only have so many colors to work with!
For Vyn and Verdan, here’s some of the palette I’ve chosen so far (with the aid of my Chief Executive Color Picker and Senior Director of Color Operations, Blossom).
The background is a dark green to reflect the base color of the game and its forest theming. The first row is for Vyn and the second row is for Verdan. You can see the primary and secondary colors for each character, followed by some background colors, the heal colors, and a tertiary color.
These colors are the main ones used for all of the branding, and, of course, for the main characters.
Then, here are the colors used for enemies. You have the main colors in the top row, which are the colors currently being used for the large portion of enemy bodies, along with appropriate accent colors as smaller squares. The secondary colors are used for smaller portion of bodies.
Each enemy uses a different color palette, a small selection of the colors from above. I currently have two rules for enemy color palettes. First, purple must feature on the enemy, either as part of the body or as a partial outline. Second, the colors must be reminiscent of pastel ice cream colors.
Pastel ice cream colors work as a general theme for the enemies. Each enemy can stand out from the others and from the background elements, but they’ll still look somewhat cute and friendly. It’s a fine balance between “this is an enemy” and “this is a cute game”.
Well, that’s what I currently have for palettes. I know that some of you are better artists than I am, so please tell me what you think! Any bits of harsh feedback, odd suggestions, or rumblings vaguely reminiscent of approval are appreciated. As per usual, please paint your comments into the Discord.