Since dev from now till uh, the game is done is just going to be “I drew this month! Can’t show you any of it since we’re in spoiler territory but I drew this month! Ok bye!” I figured I’d talk about some of my pre-demo work. I am a Colors Bitch, by which I mean coloring is my favorite part of art. I figured this time I would share how I pick color schemes for visual novels (and honestly, you can probably apply this technique to any visual medium with a cast of characters).

Step one: make moodboards.

There’s a million different programs to make moodboards nowadays, but you can also do this manually in whatever image program you use. I tend to make one general moodboard, and then sub moodboards for each character. For this, we’re going to focus specifically on character moodboards. Go through your boards and find images that are particularly That Character to you or that have colors you particularly like. If you already have a strong idea of what palette you want for your characters, you can skip this step.

Step two: grab your colors.

Either using the images you’ve gathered or the palettes from your own brain, make a color palette for each character. Don’t worry about how it looks as a unit, just focus on the individual palettes. What mood do you want this character to have? What colors do you think they’d wear?

If coming up with palettes is a struggle for you, even with the help of moodboards, this is a pretty good site to randomly generate palettes.

Step three: compile the colors

Grab EVERY COLOR from your palettes. Life’s gonna be a little easier for you if you organize them by color (I go brown-red-pink-orange-yellow-green-blue-purple) but I cannot make you do anything you don’t want to.

Step four: start excising.

Imo this bit is really soothing. Go down your palette and start grabbing ONLY YOUR FAVORITE colors. I try to make sure I have at least one of each (brown, red, pink, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple) and try to keep in mind colors I absolutely need - I already know Worthy’s hair is orange, so I want to make sure I have a good orange color, etc etc. Try to not have more than three of each color, though obviously exceptions can be made. The goal is to LIMIT our palette - get rid of colors that are too similar to each other, make sure we only have what’s absolutely necessary. Honestly, even looking at this, I probably could’ve pared it down more.

Step five: remake your palettes

Now, ONLY USING THE PALETTE YOU MADE IN THE LAST STEP, remake the individual color palettes for each character. I try to keep them to around five colors each. Keep in mind each character’s relationship with the others - Mira Clear and Regal Iridescent are married and deeply in love, so they have a lot of colors in common, but I don’t want them to come off as codependent so they still have bright colors that are unique to them. Turquoise Grace and Worthy Undone are in a lot of scenes together, so I want their palettes to be distinct but still look good together. Because the Assistance is visibly a robot (and because I have a cartoony style, that distinction might go unnoticed otherwise), I’ve grabbed the duller colors for her so she’s visually distinct.

Lining up the character palettes ALSO makes sure that you don’t repeat yourself too much - you might have noticed I’m a big fan of teal and magenta, but I’ve paired them with other colors so the characters don’t have identical palettes. There’s reasons why characters might - they’re wearing uniforms, they’re clones, they’re siblings, etc etc, but in my opinion even then you should vary at least one color between them. I’m very aware that I have certain colors I tend to favor and certain schemes I lean towards, so it’s good to keep that in mind.

(Also, the colored dot next to their names I did quick when I decided each character got a distinct color for their name in the text.)

So that’s my color process! I might get a bit more into how I apply this to character design in a different log - depends on how long the rest of the game takes to make!

CURRENT PROGRESS: Currently I am still making all the assets for the game and implementing them in the game. I have base sprites for all the characters done, but there’s still plenty of additional expressions and blocking to add. According to my little google sheet I made, I’m 70% of the way through, but that last 30% is still a pretty big chunk of the game!

Thanks for reading! As always, let me know if you have any questions or anything you’d like me to talk about next time!