Operators
Concept paint over, that I had done, to illustrate what an operator that was possessed by an alien might look like.
Operators are one of the most common NPC's in the game and we needed to telegraph to the player if they were friend or foe. Like most games, we decided not to break with tradition and use common colors like green/blue for friendly, and red for hostile. Early on I had done some concept work on what the lens flares might look like and what color sets we would want to be using.
From the beginning, e thought that not all operators would have a common default light, so I had added red and orange to the military and engineer operator. The other scientific operators were basically that same model, so they would share a blue color.
When the player hacked an operator, we wanted the visual to be green.
And when an operator turned into an enemy, we used the classic red to indicate that it was hostile towards the player.
Early operator models had clear back casing, which we also thought to utilize in telegraphing to the player its current state.
Eventually we achieved the telegraph visuals by creating attachments that we added to slots in the character tool, and then drove the materials color aparameters through code.
Testing the visual look of lens flares increasing in size when operators become hostile towards the player.