Art style tryout

This weekend I experimented a bit with the art-style of the game.

I'm not entirely sure what I want the game to look like. All I know is that the story will be dark and mature and I want the art-style to mimic this feeling. The player needs to feel small so we'll play the story from a top-down perspective.

Realistic AAA graphics are out of the question (obviously) so I'm looking for a "simpler" art style. Another prerequisite is that I can pipeline it all pretty quickly.
To test out a few art-styles, I quickly created a very simple scene. It's just boring old storage space. Important thing of note: I'm a programmer, not an artist! I'm just going to need some graphics to work with and I hate working with basic cubes and spheres like other programmers out there.

Anyway.
Let's talk results.

Basis

This is the basic scene I started from. Its a bit bland-looking: all the materials are diffuse and there are no normal maps or specular maps of any kind. Everything is textured and hand-painted though (except for the floor). 

High-contrast 

This time I added some more contrast. Not by lighting but by upping the contrast in the diffuse textures. Other than that, nothing has changed. I'm a big fan of adding a lot of contrast to a scene. I'm just hoping that this doesn't make the scene too vivid and as a result, hurt the story.

Black-and-white

This is a black-and-white version of the scene. The floor here hurts my eyes, so that would need to change if I pick this art-style. Again I fiddled with the contrast here. A lack of color means increasing contrast so the scene doesn't blend together. 

A bit of specularity

In the last try I added a bit of specularity and a very simple specular map to the floor for an added bit of realism.

Down the road

The scene was done in Unity indie, so there's no decent lightmapping, real-time shadows, HDR rendering, post-processing effects, etc. So really far down the road, I'm sure it'll look a lot better once I get my hands on all the fancy toys. 

I want add some normal maps and specular maps, too, that should really up the ante.

All things considered though, all these examples can be made rather quickly and are sufficient as work-in-progress graphics, and that's the point.

Sam out.