Art direction

A lot of thought is being put into the aesthetics and design of this game. This is my little space to talk about it.

Color Theory

Terminal Status is being made with a limited palette, only consisting of pink, blue, lavender, and monochrome. It's a high-contrast pastel color scheme taking inspiration from menhera aesthetics.

The A-plot and B-plot are also somewhat signified by color. For example, the main trio (Concuss, Lacerae, and Viscera) are all bound together with the color pink, while the cast members most associated with the B-plot tend to be represented with cool colors like blue or lavender.

Design

As this game is largely influenced by both menhera and disability narratives, all of the sci-fi tech is designed around medical aethetics.

Medical tech happens to be a huge passion of mine, something that only grew as my health journey had me visiting more and more health clinics. As I was exposed to more mobility aids, medical devices, and machinery, I couldn't help but tie them all into my other passion: science fiction.

Clothing design is largely adapting physical therapy supports into sci-fi fashion. While the main pilot suit is undergoing several redesigns, all my drafts include inspiration from KT tape (kinesiology tape); I highly suggest googling it if you've never seen KT tape before, because some of the ways it's used look incredible.

(Pretend I didn't misspell braid. I don't want to fix the image...)

Weapons that the characters and their UMAs use are all based on medical tools. For example, a syringe sword, a scalpel glaive, hand axes influenced by reflect hammers, etc.

(CC BY. Restraint system for the MedX Isolated lumbar extension machine. Full-size DOI: 10.7717/peerj.6001/fig-1)

The cockpits for the UMAs will be designed similarly to various MedX machines, which simply look like deconstructed mechs to me. However, it'll probably take me a while to get to that point in the design process because mech design is a skill I haven't put much time into yet.