Color-blind friendly mode for color-based match 3 games

[ManuelFLara]

Yesterday I was surprised to see that AstroPop has this option (which draws a different symbol on top of the blocks, based on its color) as I never thought this was a "common" problem. Then I thought that actually most successful match 3 games don't have this problem. You can easily distinguish the different items to match in Bejeweled or Big Kahuna Reef, for example.

As my next game is heavily based on a color-matching concept, I'd like to know if any of you has any kind of statistics or experiences that could be useful when considering adding this option to the game.

Thanks in advance.

[sparkyboy]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/mens_health/issues_colour.shtml

I remember back in school in the early eighties my class of about 30 took this test,and 5 pupils failed.
I think its a pretty good idea to include in these sorts of games(can't hurt)

[papillon]

Even if people aren't actually color-blind, it's nice to have extra things in case someone's monitor is not very good and the colors are hard to distinguish.

A handful of people had trouble with the rainbow bridge puzzle in Sweet Dreams because the colors weren't distinct enough on the laptops they were trying to game with - luckily for me/them I had already built in a way to retrieve the correct color name. (originally to get the name 'Indigo' in front of their eyes to help make the roygbiv link :) )

[alfie]

As my next game is heavily based on a color-matching concept, I'd like to know if any of you has any kind of statistics or experiences that could be useful when considering adding this option to the game.

Thanks in advance.

How many colours (for matching purposes) are you planning to have in the game?

I am colour blind, but there are various sorts and strengths of colour blindness. Just to give you an example: Everyone knows from an early age that Grass is Green, however if I look outside and look at the Grass on the lawn..."It's Orange".

[Robert Cummings]

Out of curiosity, do you see green as being orange or orange as being green?

Which colour - orange or green, would you most identify with the human face colour?

[Abscissa]

Out of curiosity, do you see green as being orange or orange as being green?
I'm curious about that too, BUT - somehow I don't think he'd be able to answer that ;)

[BinaryMoon]

This is something I've been thinking about as well. Being partially colour blind myself I often have problems with colour matching games when the only difference between objects is the colour (and not shape or pattern)

My colour blindness tends to be with shades of greens, browns and greys - but is fairly subtle and hasn't stopped me getting a job as a web designer & video game artist.

As for people asking what colour is what... I have always known green as green, but for all I know green actually looks like what you think red looks like. There is no way to describe how a colour looks without using colours so no way for anyone to know that you see these colours "properly".

[ManuelFLara]

How many colours (for matching purposes) are you planning to have in the game?

6 colors: red, blue, green, yellow, purple and white. All as full bright (red as 255, 0, 0; etc).


I am colour blind, but there are various sorts and strengths of colour blindness. Just to give you an example: Everyone knows from an early age that Grass is Green, however if I look outside and look at the Grass on the lawn..."It's Orange".
That sounds cool :D

[Batley]

I'm also colour blind. I find it hard to distinguish between green, red and brown, or blue, purple and pink, or yellow and orange etc depending on the shade.

I have to remember that leaves are generaly green, as is grass and that tree truncks are brown.

I've had alot of trouble in the past with matching colour games like respawns bubble bobble or popcaps Dynomite for example.

[alfie]

Out of curiosity, do you see green as being orange or orange as being green?



Depends on the shade of the colour and the lighting conditions. Playing Snooker is a nightmare, I have been known to try and pot the Brown because it looks like a Red to me.

[Pyabo]

According to Wikipedia, 6% of the male population is colorblind.

Most colorblind people are dichromats... they only have two primary colors. Normal people have 3... as we're taught in grade school.

The really interesting thing is that some women are actually tetrachromat... to their eyes there are FOUR primary colors and they can distinguish more color spectrum than "normal" people. You think that outfit you're wearing matches? Think again! :)

[dima]

I have problems with colors. Sometimes it's hard to spot greens and yellows when there are alot together. Also, it's very hard for me to see red pixels ontop of other colors. But I guess the green and yellows are the biggest of my problems. I would definitely recommend using different shapes as well as colors, or some kind of an indicator.

[Alan_3DAGames]

The figure I heard is that around 10% of the population has some form of colour blindness. (I was an electronics engineer so I remember it being talked about a few times... its an important issue in electronics).

So when I created Super Fusion, I added the option to allow the player to chose different sets of playing pieces. here's a screen shot of the selection options
Options Screenshot Image (http://www.3dagames.com/SuperFusion/Images/ShowPieceSets.jpg)

(The game allows for up to 12 different colours but thats only at the maximum difficulty setting! ... usually most people play it with around half that many colours :)

The player can also change this option at any time in the game.

I would imagine part the original design idea behind the 4 iconic Playstation buttons is partly due to wanting to help people with various forms of colour blindness.

I think its important to consider issues like this in any game design and I think its worth taking the time to try to add and extend the accessability of any game. :)

[James C. Smith]

In Big Kahuna Reef I intentionally made sure all the pieces are different colors AND different shapes. This just makes it easier to play even for people with no color perception difficulties.

By the way, being “color blind” is not a true or false type thing. There are varying degrees of impairment. My eye doctor gave me the standard test where you look at a card filled with random colored dotes and try to find the pattern that makes a number or letter. There are about 10 cards with varying level of difficulty. I could only make out the pattern on the first two cards. All the rest looked random to me. I asked the doc about it and he said my color perception was deficient. Most people can see colors better than I can. The strange thing is I never knew it. I can correctly recognize dozens of colors. I have never had a problem with colors and I never knew I was slightly color blind. I guess I just have trouble distinguishing very slight difference in hue. I can tell orange from yellow but I cannot tell (155,0,200) from (165,0, 190). I always wanted to write a computer program to explore this in real time but I never got around to it. Every monitor is different so you couldn’t compares people’s results on different computers but you could still do some interesting stuff to explore what color changes people can and can’t detect. I would love to have my wife and I both look at the monitor and slide a slider to adjust the hue delta and see who can find the pattern first.

[otaku]

Actually there is a test that can be to determine your gradation of colour blindness and which colours overlap.

There is the simple "are you colour blind?" test of showing orange and green dots (the most common form) and asking what shape is represented in them. The reason to use slightly different shades of each of the two colours is too determine how distinct the shape is when looked at.

There is also the overlap test, a similar test exists for people with synesthesia, where numbers or letters or words or shapes have colours and the colour blind person ranks the particular coloured objects as to what he believes their colours to be and also their shading.

As I understand it colour blindness is like seeing parts of the world in greyscale, but with colour. Similar to how cats see the colours of yellow, orange and red.

I also have an acquiantance who is colour blind in only one eye due to a head injury during childhood. The one eyed colour blindness used to cause him headaches but over the years he has grown used to it.

Strange that this conversation should start now as I just got back an email from a colour blind friend that I was showing our latest game to, as I wanted his feedback on whether the colours worked for him or not.

[adamw]

Seems like enough has been said on the subject, but I thought I'd toss in a real-world example. Zuma is my problem game right now. When the "purple" balls are added, I fail miserably. I can't tell them apart from the "blue" ones fast enough. They are just *barely* different to my eyes (even though I think it also has a different picture on it). So consider how fast the player has to distinguish colors too.

[otaku]

Actually, one more point. And it's more of a question. I am specifically putting in a "colour blind" mode to a puzzle game that changes the colours and makes the edges more highlighted. The shapes are unique, but it's really the colours that stand out when you are scanning for pieces. The friend who I sought some advice from was okay with the idea but I'm just curious how many other people would like to see this feature in more games?

[Robert Cummings]

I coded a snooker game about four years ago and that had a colour blind mode. It simply overlaid each ball with neat text ie "red" "brown" etc.

[JiriNovotny]

[delete this please]

[James C. Smith]

That is just evil. It doesn't give you any results at the end. It just tries to scare you with a loud sound and disgusting image. I guess you ruined your surprise but I did not find it amusing. :mad:

[digriz]

I like the idea about shapes superimposed onto the coloured graphics. What a good idea. The only problem i can see is how this affects the game. For example, the 3-in-a-row type of game shouldn't have any problems here. But anything like a platform-game or shoot-em-up, for example, you couldn't do this.

I've been thinking about this sort of problem for a while and the only logical thing i could come up with was to allow the player to choose a palette for each main graphic. It might look horrible for the standard player but the colour blind people would be able to distinguish the player, scenery and NPC's a bit more easily.

JiriNovotny, that was lame....and i thought it was a serious link too :(

[JiriNovotny]

That test is actually real, just the last one is fake :)

[Alan_3DAGames]

In a platform-game or shoot-em-up, it would be best not to just rely on somethings colour alone to distinguish various similar things. Its better to also have their shapes also helping to distinguish them in some way as well :)

So in a way, its a similar idea as a shape is also used as well as a colour to distinguish things. :)

Other things that would help making things stand out from each other are things like different texture patterns, shading and especially shadows for example (even simple cartoon shadows) ... (which are good for depth perception etc... e.g. a ball above the ground and the shadow on the ground gives the viewer an idea of height and distance etc..).

Another very good one is that things like NPC's are most likely moving. (The human eye is very good at picking up movement, and it uses different light sensitive cells in the eyes to detect it, so its more information for the brain to pickup on).... Its like the idea of camouflage in a way; how a hunting animal has to stand still so its not seen. As soon as it moves, its camouflage colouring isn't anywhere nearly as useful. :)

[Martoon]

The Great Guru Pavlina is colorblind, and none of his games required the player to distinguish things based on color. He discussed this in one of his customer newsletters, using it as a marketing angle.

[GBGames]

I remember reading somewhere that Frozen Bubble was moddified to make it more color-blind friendly. I don't know the details.

But even for those who aren't color-blind, having multiple indicators can only help.

For instance, on my Linux box, I can configure the command "ls" to display items in colors representing regular files, directories, binaries, etc.

So directories are blue, files are gray, binaries are green.

But I also configured it to show me more info:

directory/
binary*
file

So directories are blue and have a trailing /.
Binaries are green and have a trailing *.
Files are gray and have nothing trailing after them.

Either works fine for most people, but having both just reinforces it and makes it easier for the user to work with it.

It's like having a sound effect occur when the user presses the mouse button. You don't need it, and if they are clicking on the button, the visual will indicate that it is being pressed, but having both gives great feedback to the user.

[koenji]

Vischeck www.vischeck.com offers tools to simulate colorblind vision. Just take any image (like a screenshot from your game) and pass it through their converter: the resulting image shows how a colorblind person would actually see the original image.

[arcadetown]

Try this one:
http://www.liquidgeneration.com/sabotage/vision_sabotage.asp :D
Well I thought that was hillarious. Thought I was also color blind and didn't even know for a second there.