I had a bit of a reality check today. I stumbled onto an app that simulates color blindness, and boy, does it make a difference for some games. Case in point: Galder, the puzzler that I never seem to have time to finish. Discerning between the different gemstones by color alone is nigh-on impossible by 8% of the population. Good thing the stones have different shapes as well.


I just wanted to throw this out as a reminder to all you designers out there - don't rely on color.

The app is >here< for those who want to see what it's like.

Well i believe that from a strictly business perspective missing the 90% of windows users is worst

Chromacell (you could call it my Galder as I never get time to finish it after 5 years!) would suffer the same. Thanks for pointing it out. Hope you don't mind me stealing, sorry, being inspired by your different shape per colour idea

I ran into the same problem with my soon to be released card game. However for that there is no way around it so I will just have to target the remaining 92%.

Quote:Hope you don't mind me stealing, sorry, being inspired by your different shape per colour idea

Heavens, no.
As for missing 90% of the market, yeah, that's sad. No reason to further cut into the baseline, though.

For Hot Spot X, I had a couple requests from color-blind users to make the game more playable for them so I added tiles that were more easily distinguishable for them.

That would definitely be a good program to run on most games while working on the art. GL Golf turned out OK for me but I'm afraid to test Escape now because there are 4 different color key/keyholes, I might have to change the physical shape of them and not just the color

Nifty. Definitely keeping this around for future use...

I remember playing Riven and color is part of one of the puzzles in there. The blue and purple were not different enough for me. It really annoys me when you have a really nice and fun game and there is a simple drawback like colors being too close in shade and intensity that the game becomes harder or more frustrating than normal. Riven isn't alone here.

The other nuisance, especially with Riven like games, is that there may be a very tiny hot spot you need to find on the screen in order to progress. I had to cheat in one situation where there was a switch that needed to be pressed. Even with the cheat I had a difficult time finding it.

When I created Fashion Cents, I had requests from color-blind players who had trouble matching the clothes by color. In this situation, changing the shape of the different colored clothing item pieces was not really an option - you can't really change the shape of a shirt or a pair of pants very much. So the way I solved that was by giving the player the ability to right-click on a doll or clothing item and get a list of colors. That way, they could at least see the color names and match that way.

Since Fashion Cents is a Windows game, that solution worked fine. But now I am porting the game to Mac, and I'm not sure yet how I'm going to solve this for Mac users (some of whom use a one-button Mighty Mouse).

Control-click is the substitute for right-clicking with a single button mouse. (BTW, there is no single button Mighty Mouse, since the Mighty Mouse was specifically made to have more than one button. The older single button mice where dubbed the "Apple Pro Mouse.")

BeyondCloister Wrote:I ran into the same problem with my soon to be released card game. However for that there is no way around it so I will just have to target the remaining 92%.

It turns out that after showing the colours I've used in a Pantone book to a colour blind person that I got it right after all.