Color Palettes, design restrictions, and blender

Good evening,

I think my favorite part of game dev is designing the look and feel of a game, and I say that having developed very few games. As I mentioned in my weekend update, the use of pixel art in my textures is a key element to the look of this game. This is proving to be a fairly efficient process to add detail to the game, as pixel art can be developed fairly rapidly with the restrictions I have put in place. A Door Ajar has a loose guideline of 32 pixels per meter and uses an 8 color palette .  This, for me at least, makes my decision so much easier when I have to decide, for instance, what the texture for a wood table is going to look like.

One unexpected aspect of using a limited color palette is how black levels in lighting affect the scene. It helped to tweak the unreal engine settings and my post process material settings in order to generate a black level that more closely matched the darkest color of my palette. It also becomes more important to consider how colored lights affect the colors on your materials. If your light color matches too closely to the palette colors, a lot of your scene will start to wash out. Since most of my palette colors are in yellow, green, and blue hues, it seems that red and purple lighting shows up the best. I still have work to do there. 

The last achievement for today was figuring out how to invert normals in blender meshes in order to apply textures to the inside of a hollow mesh. This is the process I’m going to use for some of the individual room designs, as it allows me to wrap a texture inside of a room shaped mesh. It’s almost certainly not the best way to make individual rooms, but it’s a process that works for me that keeps my time in blender to a minimum. Hopefully one day I will learn to love Blender, but I’m not there yet. 

The rest of the dev logs leading up to the game jam release are probably going to be long form like this. There may be some shorter devlogs over the weekend. If so, I will probably wait to post additional screenshots until then. 

Doc Karl