a palette for romance

Palette building can be a tricky business. Unless there’s a strong graphic idea pushing you one way or the other -- like the choice to have a grimly limited palette for “A Matter of Murder” to compliment the Gorey-esque artstyle  -- detemining an optimum size for a palette can be daunting. Too few colors and the game’s visual variety can be stunted. Too many colors and the player’s faith in the cohesion of the game world suffers. 

Through trial and error with the avatar models, we ended up with a preliminary palette of twenty-four colors, including six potential skin tones. An emphasis was placed on groups of closely-related shades so we could play up the subtler wallpaper textures being used in the dresses. The greys and blacks are mostly reserved for the male characters. So far, this seems like a comfortable range, particulary as the settings have been developing with a lot of white, open space to allow the saturated colors to shine. But that’s another blog entry…