Hello!
My name is Petra and I am currently working on a shoot em up game called ‘Beelonging’. I am lead artist of the team and during the last week I’ve been working on making a color scheme for the characters in the game. The reason why I made a color scheme was to make it easier for the artists to share the colors while working on the same characters/background and also to see how the colors fit together.
Our game consists of a player bee, AI bees, a fly, a spider, a dragonfly and a wasp. To pick the right colors for our game I had to consider our target audience and the art style for the game. However, I started off by making a few rough sketches of the bee as a warm up.
Rough sketches of characters
‘Beeloning’ is supposed to be a game for children, with a target audience around 7-8 year olds. What’s usually common in children’s’ games is the use of very bright and saturated colors. Saturated and bright colors seem to attract children more than pastels or muted blends. This is something that can be noticed in popular games for children like Angry birds, Minecraft, Plants vs. Zombies etc.
Moodboard
Keeping this in mind, I created a moodboard as inspiration for the art style and colors of our game. As in Angry birds, we want to keep it quite simple using one base color, one/two highlight(s) and one shade. To find colors for our characters I searched for images of insects. Also, the designer of my team sended me pictures of different insects as inspiration and references. Even though our game is cartoony and not very realistic art style wise, we wanted to keep the game somehow realistic regarding colors, for instance, making the be black and yellow. This lead to a small problem though.
Since the bee and the wasp both share the same colors it was important to differentiate them, not only by their shapes and sizes, but also by their colors. Therefore, I picked a more varm, soft hue of yellow and black for the bee and a more venomous, colder hue of yellow (green-ish) and black for the wasp. By doing this, the colors could communicate to the players that the wasp in the game is dangerous while the bee is friendly (though, this might seem obvious).
Color sample for bee and wasp
Saturation
When I selected the colors I made sure that the colors were about 65-75% saturated and I also wanted to pick colors to differentiate the characters from each other and avoiding using the same colors. I also wanted to avoid the color green for the characters since most of the background probably will be a green-ish forrest. To make the characters stand out from the background I was also thinking about making the background less saturated, and this is something I will be working on the following weeks. I am aware though that there might be some changes of the colors during the project if something looks odd, but for now we have the basic colors for the characters!
Current color scheme for characters
Gameblog 
Nice work with the colors! I noticed when playing your game that the art style was very consistent across all assets.
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Hi Petra! I must say I am extremely impressed by your blog Post. You were incredibly thoughtful with explaining every single aspect you had consider while preparing for the making of your game. It was easy to see your thought behind the the colors you choose, by looking and comparing with previous games for children you made it clear why you started of with so bright and colorful colors. You didn’t just pick the bright colors for your different characters but you even consider the hue and saturation, as can be seen with the colors for the bee and the wasp. Your “Game of belonging” seems to be very fun, I love the aesthetics that is portrayed and I can’t wait to play it. Your text was very clear and easy to understand and had a nice flow, I felt as if I was just dancing through the text. I give you a thumbs up.
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