Feeling Blue

The last month has been a really sad and difficult time for me. I don’t want to go into details, it’s just to say that I didn’t get as much done this last month as usual. 

On to what I did get done: Blue terrain experiments.

Rich blue environments can be difficult, especially if it’s supposed to be semi-realistic or at least plausible.  A saturated blue terrain can look very cartoonish. It’s especially difficult to make it look right in Factorio, which leans towards orange tones.

Desaturating it helps but that should be more of a last resort because it can start to look cold and sad if the vibrance is removed. 

Mixing in layers of other vegetation colours is an easy fix, but it also masks underlying problems if you start that way. 

Ideally the blue terrain would look good even if it’s all blue.  That’s the real test. If the terrain can look good even when it’s in the most bare, single-hue, uncluttered form, then you know that you’ve got a solid foundation of assets.

That’s one of the reasons you see me focus on very restricted colour palettes so much. It’s one of the most revealing test cases. 

Another reason is that restricted colour palettes can give a very pure and iconic look to a terrain. This is nice a lot of the time, but shouldn’t be done all the time. 

If you add too many colours you can end up with the rainbow terrain effect, which can look nice on occasion (like tundra vegetation), but then it’s harder to make distinct from other rainbow terrain.

In contrast, if you start with a blue base terrain, you can still get a wide range of different looking terrains by adding different secondary colours. 

As a general rule, I find it best to start with a very restricted palette, get it working well enough with that restriction, and then gradually add move variation until you get the right look for the area. 

In this example, I’ve gone for primarily purplish blue terrain, with more cyan as the vegetation gets drier. 

This image is also a nice example of new decoratives from different methods:

The first and easiest is the old land coral decorative from earlier versions of Factorio. They look a bit like tiny leafless trees. In the original they were green, but here they are cyan and are half the size.

The second is a plant that ended up looking a little bit like blue kale with light grey edges (mostly on the right side of the images). These were designed very intentionally with a specific shape and texture in mind, something to contrast with the other shapes that will usually be in these sorts of regions.

The third is the decorative with circular shapes of cyan with brown cracks between them, mainly on the edge of the dried river bed. This one came into being because I was drawing the base layer for some cracked earth, and thought it would look interesting if there was some lichen or slime mould that colonised each plate of earth. It ended up like some sort of “crustose” lichen, which wasn't originally planned, but that’s just how it goes sometimes, nature got there first.

There are other new decoratives in the picture too, but I wanted to focus on these 3 because they illustrate 3 very different ways of getting to new decoratives: Remixing existing stuff. Designing with clear intent. And last but not least, designing by exploration and discovery.