colour harmony suggestions

nitrofurano on 2009/08/09 19:31

Hi! Based on some screenshots of some game entries i found here, maybe people wanted to improve the colours of their sprites and backgrounds may want to use some better colour harmonies.
A good suggestion i can't avoid reccomending is this social network http://www.colourlovers.com/ which you can contribute with your ones (for example, my account is http://www.colourlovers.com/lover/nitrofurano ), and choose among about a million of colour harmonies available, all cc-nc-sa.
Telling this because i saw some indie games with really fantastic colour harmonies (like Rescue The Beagle - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k47in_iWBm0 , or The Beggar (from Scott Brodie) ), you all may also to try that on your own games.
(even the areas 4 and 5 of Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Rez (yes, that one!) can show how important a good colour scheme can be)
Please let me know about your oppinions! cheers!

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Comments

Martin on 2009/08/09 20:38:

A good colour scheme really is one of the easiest ways to cheat your way to good looking graphics. It was something we aimed for when writing Digby Marshmallow last year, and I think it paid off quite well. I hadn't come across the site you mention, but Adobe Kuler does something quite similar, and has a quite nice flash interface for messing about with colours. It also has a nice feature where you can feed it a photo, and it'll produce a nice set of colours to work with it.

By the way, colour schemes under a CC-NC-SA license? Open source licensing gone mad.

nitrofurano on 2009/08/09 22:55:

@Martin
Well, i see a good colour scheme as a start, or what can be a complement to a good drawing, as a good pixel art, or done by a generative code - and not as an easy shortcut - and of course, a game is way much more than just moving crops of drawings around - i cited 'Rescue the Beagle' and 'The Beggar' as games with good colour schemes, good drawings, and good concept, and good indie games.
(btw, i got to know about these two games by following rss feeds - in a rss news reader like Liferea - like from http://indiegames.com )
Kuler is also good, but it appeared almost one year later than colourlovers.com - but well, colourlovers.com is a simple Flash-free social network site, and exports to more formats, and you can also download them in thousands as easy as from a wget script in a terminal. colourlovers.com also allows you picking from photos, just entering an url of it. Be welcome doing a try there! :)
And why these colour schemes can't be cc-nc-sa, since they all are colaborative, and just a combination of 5 colours?

Martin on 2009/08/09 23:22:

I agree with you, colour schemes are important in all sorts of work, and yes, they work better when they're put with other excellent pieces of artistry. But for Pyweek, the important things really are the easy shortcuts, and I think that colour is a nice way to quickly get distinctive good-looking graphics, without needing huge amounts of artistic skill.

I can see that what we want out of a colour website is very different - it never even crossed my mind to download a thousand schemes with wget (what would I use them for?), and I see the Flash interface as a positive, rather than a negative. But that's good! Choice is one of the best things about the internet. I was just presenting people with the alternative.

Finally, and hopefully not getting into a dull and tedious licensing argument, I personally believe that a colour scheme isn't really something that should be copyrightable, let alone require a license. Do you really think people have a moral right to claim a set of 5 colours and prevent others from using them commercially? They're colours, they don't belong to anyone.

richard on 2009/08/10 00:17:

Great resource, thanks!

gcewing on 2009/08/12 09:30:

Martin wrote: Do you really think people have a moral right to claim a set of 5 colours and prevent others from using them commercially?

Don't know about morally, but Cadbury apparently think they own the colour purple, at least as far as chocolate is concerned...

Martin on 2009/08/12 10:21:

Cadbury have a trademark on (a particular shade of) the colour purple - that's very different from asserting a copyright claim. Essentially they are saying (probably correctly) that people associate purple in a chocolate context with their brand, and that people who make chocolate in purple wrappers are probably trying to trick people into thinking it's Cadbury's chocolate. It's a system designed to protect both Cadbury and their customers from fraud, rather than a system for protecting Cadbury's creative rights.

I'm not sure I necessarily agree that they should be able to do this, but I think it's very different from posting a set of five colours to a website and thereby asserting that these colours are your intellectual property, and can only be used within the terms of a license you provide.

nitrofurano on 2009/08/14 17:35:

@Martin besides that Linux/OSX issue in the same machine, Digby Marshmallow is a very addictive and pleasureful game! (maybe only barometer and 'pipemeter' are too large on the screen, imho) congratulations and thank you! you and all team on that game, keep surprising us! :)

devon on 2009/08/18 21:22:

starting with one of the 8-bit systems color palettes is also a good way to look consistent and retro (but may induce eye bleeding). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_8-bit_computer_hardware_palettes

nitrofurano on 2009/08/19 17:40:

@devon - yes, 8bit systems colours are awesome - like that used on msx1/colecovision/sg1000/ti99 - c64 and zx-spectrum are very good as well - those limitations are very inspiring! :)