So I've modeled a basic enemy with vertex colors painted on as opposed to UVs. That one shader i talked about with making the sprites pop out from the background wasn't wasted. The ones on the left of each pair has a custom shader i made to make the lighting affect the colors much less. Making them pop out more from the background.
This isn't an artstyle choice so much as a readability thing. I might be overthinking it though. As long as the humanoids are the only thing moving and the environment is relatively simple. It shouldn't be too hard to point out what's relevant. Having said that it's also why I've been trying to keep the environment fairly Doom wad-ish. I plan to make anything that's modeled to be interactable to some degree, and the rest will likely be baked into whatever I manage in the quake editor.
Before rigging and animating I tend to just throw the models into the ingame scene because I never know what something looks like until it's ingame. The enemies are a bit generic but I'm liking how they're brining back the Virtua Cop influence, the lack of any complicated detail I think will help with standing out. This model is actually based on the protagonist but just puff the chest up to look more stocky and bam there ya go. I'm probably going to reuse the hell out of this model though.
Next up is rigging and animating these fools