Long Live the New Flesh!

Shipwrecked is officially sunk as of 9/30/2010 and I'm off to the final frontier. I've been assigned to the 'Spacefighter' team (we really need a name) and am currently focusing my efforts on art design while dabbling in game design. So far I have come up with the following objectives for our art:

• Objects belonging to different factions must be visibly different at a distance.
• Objects must be visible against a black background (there will be other background colors, but black is the big one).
• As our models will be mostly static, we need a way to impart personality to them other than animation.

I've seized upon the use of color as a starting point towards meeting these objectives. As the game stands, the conflict is between two rival corporations over a limited resource. These corporations are large and wealthy enough to not only support small standing armies, but to hire mercenaries as well. They're rather powerful, and would likely present themselves as such. They also seem, to me, somewhat sinister given the fact that they are willing to employ lethal force in the name of profit. From these observations and the earlier stated objectives I  have come up with the following requirements for their respective color schemes:

• Must contrast with one another.
• Must contrast with the environment.
• Must convey a feeling of power.
• Must say something about the personality of the corporation it represents.
• These personalities must clash with one another.

Lets start with bullet number 3, the one about power. One of the main connotations of the color black is literally power. Black also has a lot of bevy of sinister connotations to go with, which suit my purposes nicely. However, black isn't exactly going to show up well against the background, so we need a high-contrast secondary color. The main options here would be either yellow or white, and I'm going with white because I personally find that it goes better with black than yellow does - especially so in logos, which will need to be represented in the overall color scheme.

So now we have a basic high-contrast color scheme. But what does it tell us about the corporation it represents? The primary color, black, is all about wealth, power, mystery, style, modernity, elegance, and sophistication. They're big, they're bad, they're better than you and they know it. Throw in the white. White, like black, is concealing. It's sterile; pure. They've got a few skeletons in the closet, but you don't know that. If you did, you'd soon be one of them. These guys don't leave loose ends.

So there is one color scheme and the associated personality. Now to apply it to creating the models for it to go on. The colors we've got are elegant, modern, and sterile. This tells me we want long, smooth curved surfaces. White is a fragile, light color and black has a slimming effect, so lets go ahead and make the models reflect that by making them thin and sleek, with various points where it seems like they would snap in half if touched. Terrible idea if you're ever trying to build a real spaceship, but it should look neat. Unlike this early concept art/reference image I've done, which looks like ass:

 

That looks so terrible I'm not even going to bother with writing up why I'm leaning towards a split analogous scheme with a red primary for the other corporation. I might get around to adding my ideas on pods before class, but probably not, because that is a really terrible drawing and I hate it. Ugh. That stuff is all on our internal documents anyways.