Picking/creating a color palette is an important part of designing a game. A cohesive palette gives the project an appropriate mood and conveys the feeling to the player.
How to Create a Color Palette
The easiest way to quickly generate a palette is to look for artwork that has a feel similar to our goal, and copying the colors we like from there.
Another quick way is to use generators such as coolors.co
Alternatively we can play around with color picker and try to find colors that we like, and that work well together. Then create a set of dark and light shades for each of the main colors we want to use.
HSV Model
When creating a palette, the HSV model is very useful, as we want our saturation to be fairly uniform across the primary colors.
the HSV model describes colors in the following way:
- Hue - the shade of the color
- Saturation - the amount of greyness
- Value - the brightness
Matching the Mood
Saturation is usually connected to how fun, easy and light-hearted the game is. Highly saturated colors are common in games like Mario, and kids games, while bleak colors are used in darker or more serious projects.
Useful Tricks
Hue Shifting
Making the hue of brighter colors closer to yellow, and the darker ones closer to blue, additionally to changing their brightness when creating color palettes will make the transitions more natural
Color Bridging
Taking similar colors at the ends of the spectrum, and reducing them to one color, to have less colors overall, and tie the palette togethe