JR The Game - Palettes and Color Schemes

  This graphic is a wallpaper of the Katamari Damacy game series. Aside from the rather silly-looking characters and landmasses, the game has a very distinct art style that is serving as inspiration for my own. The colors chosen in the art are a mix between bright and earthy tones, but they’re all applied to simplistic shapes, and they are all in a pastel style. The shading is also very simplistic, and you can see that in the fact that each part of the shade is a layer of a single color, instead of a smooth realistic transition.


   The art style gives off a cartoonish and non serious vibe, which the colors and the simple shading enhance. The artists probably chose this style to reflect the crazy and nonsensical nature of the game overall. You’re rolling a ball around and picking up objects to make your katamari bigger, and the objects tend to be crazy or do crazy things (examples being sheep on mopeds, penguins on a couch, etc.), so they went with an art style that matches the situation. As with the characters, they went for bright, crazy colors, to both follow the vibe of the game and to make them stand out (the King’s multi-colored pattern on his long helmet thing is a notable example). Their overall intent is to give off a relaxing but silly vibe that will give the player a good laugh while playing.

With JR The Game, I am going for a similar art style, but with a bit more detail. The graphics I picked to extract colors from demonstrate the different color schemes that different elements of the game will have. Like the environments in Katamari, the environments in JR will have pastel earth tones that match their setting, which will gain more brightness and color as the game progresses. However, they will still sit in the same general range of brightness between levels. Each level will have it’s own palette of appropriate tones that follow an overall color scheme, but will still look more unique on each. The big exception will be Fiesta city, which will have it’s own bright and festive color scheme through it’s own levels.
The graphics used as references for the color palette, however, are realistic images. I hope to simplify the color amount in each one to create more fitting environments for mood boards. 


The characters follow a different style. Like Katamari, these characters will consist of brighter colors and extra details (while staying true to the cartoonish theme). As you can see on the character palette, the tones selected are less pastel and less earthy than the background palettes, and they contain a much wider array of colors. it also shows the contrast between JR’s and Pedro’s color schemes, JR having brighter versions of his environments’ earth tones, while Pedro has vibrant and festive colors to go with the vibe of his Fiesta City environment. I plan to give the game’s enemies a similar color scheme to Pedro’s. The overall intent of this contrast is to make the characters stand out more easily while still fitting in with the game’s overall style.