Taking a turn to make the game more colourful

I started out with the intention to make the game look colourful and fresh and I kind of lost that with my inspiration of Dark Souls, while I do still want Dark Souls in influence the tone of the game I want some more lively and colourful designs.

Another game that is like Dark Souls in Monster Hunter, just by chance I recently bought an art book 'Monster Hunter Illustrations, and in a time of severe art block and lack of inspiration it sparked something.

Monster Hunter has this really great design where the villages are very colourful and lively while the wilderness areas where you fight monsters are more natural and desolate, which is an atmosphere that I would quite like to emulate, I have already established that desolate and natural wilderness with the remains of human architecture littered around the environment.

Since starting to focus in on the Bonobo camps I started to really lose inspiration and I was drawing blanks most of the time, I didn't really have any main influence but now I think I have somethign to start from. 

I was always sure that the bonobo tribes would be very colourful and flaunty; it's something I didn't intend to touch on until I start character designs later but the Bonobo (of today) have highly sexualised communities, they are very liberal with sex and use it almost as currency and conflict resolution, I intend to have this play a significant role in their evolution as they develop increasingly intricate cultures based on this economy of sex. 

I collected some reference first of some screenshots and concept art of villages in Monster Hunter to use as inspiration.

From looking at these images I feel like I have a better idea of what kind of aesthetic to shoot for now, but so that I'm not just copying the monster hunter style villages, I wanted to rather use that as a foundation to find my own references to use, for now I just had a look in my existing reference folder which is just a folder where I put images I saved for potential future reference and it comes in handy for times like this where I just need quick inspiration.

This colourful and exuberant village design also helps distance the aesthetic from the generic brown and grey post apocalypse, and enforce the idea of a new world and a fresh start.