Colour Script

After stuggling with colour schemes for my game and creeping on my friend Jess' honours blog I've been inspired to create a colour script for my game.

I really liked the example of the Journey colour script she posted and how it portrayed the colour palettes along side the basic shapes of the environment to help really push the mood that area was trying to achieve:

I also really liked this example of the colour script for The Incredibles and how complicated scenes are simplified in to geometric shapes:

And this is my first attempt at a colour script for Ritual:

I wanted to start of the game with a relatively "safe" colour scheme of light greens and purples mixed in with gritty darker shades to create a sort of gritty, grungy look.  In the school area there will still be "safe" light blues however the colours will start to shift to a darker and more sinister palette.  The corridor on the way to the ritual room will be very dark with lots of black overlays to obstruct the players view, literally keeping them "in the dark", with breaks of neon graffiti to serve as uncomfortably bright warnings.  The ritual room itself will be dark and red to symbolise danger and rooms with portals hidden in them will also make use of dangerous and dark palettes.  Finally, the alternate dimension which the climatic event of the game will take place in will make use of unsettling, saturated colours set off with grim black and white tones.

However I want to experiment a bit more with the colours before I finalise the script so here's some alternate thumbnails:

Hallway and Forrest 

For these I just played about with the hue of the overall thumbnail.  The first thumbnail for the hallway here looks a bit too bright and surreal though.  The other two look a bit more gritty and menacing in comparison to the original light blue thumbnail however, which is a lot more fitting for the game.

A rusty, red forest looks pretty cool however might be straying away from the relatively "safe" colour scheme I want at this point.  I also really want the initial forest to really contrast with the weird and jarring colours of the "limbo" forest environment at the end of the game so sticking to a relatively normal colour scheme might be a good idea.

Limbo

I really want the limbo environment to have a super uncomfortable colour scheme for the player, so lots of over saturated colours mixed with sinister blacks is what I'm going for.  I can't decide which one might work best though.

The inverted colour scheme idea came about when I was messing about with overlays in the game and accidentally broke it.  I took a quick clip of it which you can view here.  I really like the idea of glitching the game at this point as it messes with the relationship between player and game - the horror of the game is so real it reaches beyond the player character and messes with your graphics card!  A mechanic along the same lines as this was used in Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem where the player character was given a "sanity meter" and if it became too low the game would act as though it was deleted all the saves off the player's memory card.  This is a concept I'm really interested in and it would be really cool to explore it in my own game.