I remember a statement made within one of our lectures, stating: 'subject matter often evolves around personal obsession'. Now, I might be too obsessed about some subjects... (*cough* Devil May Cry anyone? *cough*) but one of which I am still craving to research more thoroughly: Team Fortress 2.
Team Fortress is all about 2 opposing teams (RED vs BLU) trying to steal each others secret documents, or controlling each other's territory. Despite their almost identical fundamentals, both teams have very different visual cues.
The RED team uses a more wooden, (redneck) architecture, where BLU uses octagonal (clean) factory elements. These cues are bleeding throughout every facet of the game, especially the colouring. And this is where their colour fundamentals hop in.
Like Marthe Jonkers' paper about colour usage in games, Team Fortress uses pictorial and psychological colour effects to their advantage.
For example, one's eye is often drawn towards areas with highest contrast and complexity. Therefore they designed their characters deliberately to suit gameplay needs. Besides the obvious visual cue: friend or enemy? (Blue or red?), they placed the area of highest contrast at chest level. This way, you could immediately see what weapon your enemy is carrying. Secondly, the 9 classes in the game were designed in such a way, that even without lighting (silhouettes) you would be able to identify them.
And finally, their definition and rendering of the meaning 'character' in games is truly awesome. They each give the character a distinct silhouette, a stereotypical element (often based upon a country's prejudices), and extremely well done animations. One of the creators at Valve stated once that, the word 'classes' was being more and more replaced by the term 'character'. And if a character truly has blended in with his gameplay-wise self, then I think you have struck gold.
And lastly, the voice acting deserves to be mentioned, as I often find the various sentences (which so adequately describe the character's personality) hilarious at times.
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