Comments on: Spooky Lesson About Colorblindness and Game Production

By: &nbsp Game Design for the Color Blind Player » GBGames - Thoughts on Indie Game Development

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:02:43 +0000

[...] but I’ve had players complain that the “blue-on-blue” scheme is hard to see. GameProducer.net also documented a problem that a color blind player had during a [...]

By: work and play

work and play — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 18:40:45 +0000

Got to the bottom of your blog and saw the bit about color blindness. I can distinguish between red and green very easily and I never understood how they are not seen, but I do believe it. I have a problem with telling the difference between purple and brown, also have trouble with orange and pink.

I’d like to tell you I really like your blog! I have always dreamed of creating games every since playing games like deja vu and maniac mansion (yeah some time ago), but I lack skills, have no programming knowledge and I guess I’m too old to be taking up a course in learning such things just so I could some day hope to create a fun game.

Keep up the good work. You’re bookmarked in my browser now.

By: Juuso - Game Producer

Juuso - Game Producer — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 16:34:25 +0000

Harry, hah – thanks for the story! :)

By: Harry Kalogirou

Harry Kalogirou — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 09:39:43 +0000

Yes the red/green dismatch is only part of the problem. Some people misinterpret only certain greens and reds, while others can’t tell green blue or some other color in between. I had a friend while in college that was colorblind.. I must say he created the most groovy GUIs I had ever seen!! :) Pink backgrounds with purple fonts and stuff like that!

Yet the best QuakeWorld deathmatch player I faced!

By: Juuso - Game Producer

Juuso - Game Producer — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 19:12:47 +0000

moiremusic, good point – thanks. Edited the post now. (and generalization was due my lack of knowledge – was no meaning to generalize)

By: moiremusic

moiremusic — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 18:11:50 +0000

“if your game design relies on colors you should make sure they arenâ€™t red or green or it will be tough time for colorblind people.”

You should generalize color people no more than you generalize your audience. Not all colorblind people have difficulty distinguishing red and green. There are many different kinds of colorblindness. As always:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness

By: Juuso - Game Producer

Juuso - Game Producer — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 15:58:28 +0000

Nice stories (an tips) Ben and Vedran, thanks.

By: Vedran Klanac

Vedran Klanac — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 06:35:22 +0000

This is so true, about having people hard to recognoze colors properly. We had similar experience while testing Fire Flower among various people. Ok, for those who’re not familiar, it is pattern matching puzzle game with colorful flowers. We had dark and light flowers on the screen, where light flowers were used to mark already used spots on the board. We noticed that people are not seeing difference between free spots and used spots, regardless the very good contrast and great variation in colors. What we did to resolve that was to use variation in shape ! That helped a lot. We made used spots to have animated flowers which were scaling and rotating constantly. We were surprised with this discovery a lot. But obviously, human brain can better recognize variation in shape than in color, at least for males, since males are only affected by colorblindness.

By: Ben

Ben — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 22:10:29 +0000

As a game developer who is colour blind (albeit only minimally) I always make sure to have differences in shape/ texture between items to make things easier to distinguish. Whilst colour blindness doesn’t really make you see i black and white it often helps to take a screenshot of your game and then turn it to greyscale and then look at the contrast between different pieces. If they look the same/ similar then you could be in trouble (this is a good tip for web design as well).

By: rascunho » Blog Archive » links for 2007-06-10

rascunho » Blog Archive » links for 2007-06-10 — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 20:21:49 +0000

[...] Â» Spooky Lesson About Colorblindness and Game Production – Game Producer Resource â€œI cannot see green or red well, Iâ€™m colorblindâ€. (tags: http://www.gameproducer.net 2007 color_blind daltÃ´nico games blog_post) [...]