A Splash of Colour

August 31, 2018

Development of Sleuthhoounds: Cruise has advanced to the point where I’ve been able to refine the background of one of the rooms of the ship to a certain degree. To date, I’ve been keeping visual assets for the game in as rough a state as possible so that if, for example, the layouts of rooms need to change in any significant way the amount of rework needed is as minimal as possible. However, there was one area of the cruise ship that I have been wanting to experiment with in refining and that’s the cabins.

The cruise ship that Jane Ampson and Pureluck Homes find themselves on has several different sizes of cabins that roughly equates with the standing in society or else the personal characteristics that each passenger on board has. To try to save on at least some production time, I thought it might be possible to reuse some of the backgrounds for the cabins. For example, the people in the smallest cabins would all have the same small cabin background.

[Rough pencil sketch of the small cabin.]
Rough pencil sketch of the small cabin.

I had one concern about this reuse of backgrounds, which was the identification of the cabins with their respective passengers. I had the idea that if I decorated each room with a few sprites that added splashes of colour that matched the colouring of the characters’ sprites that it would differentiate the rooms sufficiently without requiring completely different backgrounds for each. Here’s the current result:

[The cabins of Colonel Forsythe, Pureluck Homes, and Beckers Swift (in progress).]
The cabins of Colonel Forsythe, Pureluck Homes, and Beckers Swift (in progress).
Click to view larger.

Obviously, since the shared background image isn’t coloured yet, the full effect of the customizations to each cabin can’t quite be gauged. Even so, I’m fairly pleased with these early results. It feels like there’s enough use of matching colours to identify the appropriate character with the matching room but not so much use of such colours that those characters disappear into the background of those rooms, so to speak.

I’ll likely do a bit more tweaking of the colours and layouts, but these early results are quite encouraging. The small cabin here is the simplest of the cabin designs and it’s good to use it as a proof of concept before moving onto work with refining the other rooms.