Colour 15

Video Games- Katamari, Call of Duty, Team Fortress 2, Kingdom hearts 2

I recently re-played a few games specifically to look at their colour schemes and pallets. This first game i re-played was katamari damacy on ps2. 

The games is quite surreal as you play a race of aliens collecting junk from earth by rolling a ball around, similar to what a dung beetle does. Eventually you'll collect enough junk to make your ball the size of a planet.

As you play the game, you go around different environments, starting at a small area like a bedroom and eventually start wondering cities. Everything is coloured as they are in real life but the colours are very flat and also fairly vibrant. I feel it really reflects off the mood of the game as it's a very cheerful and fun game but also fairly surreal and i think the vector art based style really helps to portray that element of the game.

This a piece of concept from the game. It's very obvious by looking at this concept and the use of it's colour, what type of game or mood this videogame portrays.

Call of duty has a very grungy colour palette, using mostly broken colours and shades rather than pure hues. I find these colours a bit dull and not very exciting but they do an excellent job of portraying war. Without any pure hues or bright colours, your always set in an environment which is dirty and harsh.

The image above is a scene where you get ambushed in a field. The obvious colour of choice is green but again, we dont see any pure hues. the grass itself is a dirty green and so is the moss on the rocks. They all use a variety of shades. The sky is also a shade of blue. Green and blue are both harmonious but the shades of their colours make them less vibrant. It's also an accurate representation of the real world as we rarely see alot of just pure colours.

Team Fortress 2 takes two elements of what i mentioned before and puts them into one game. As you can see from the screenshots above, the game is very bright. Alot of the colours are bright and saturated and most of the levels takes place outside, in the sun. This brightens the entire game and makes the colours you see even brighter. We also see a very obvious distinction between the two teams with their bright red or blue shirts. The art direction and style is also very cartoony.

However the game is a team based shooting game, based around killing the other teams. It's an odd mix to combine a bright and cartoony, almost child like art direction, with a very grim subject.

Another game i played was kingdom hearts 2, which is an adventure game with characters and worlds from the disney universe.

The story line has a fairly serious tone of trying to stop a horde of monsters taking over the disney worlds while at the same time you are trying to find and rescue your friends before they get killed. So the game has a very serious tone but as they include characters from disney, the art direction and also colour takes influence from the cartoons.

The game does a good job of portraying how serious thee scenario is throughout the game. In some sections where your travelling on a spaceship, the colours are very vibrant and undisturbed. The objects also use a variety of colours and are very saturated. Here you get a sense that it's supposed to be fun and energetic, which it is.

As you get nearer to the end where the story unfolds, the world is very dark and uses more shades of colours and also uses sinister combinations of colours like purple and red. However you also see that some parts of the colours are still fairly undisturbed and fits into the whole theme of the game.