When I was a young lad, a friend asked why I had marked my Rubik's cube with symbols on each side before scrambling it. I should've said I was installing a color blindness accessibility mod.
One thing that is underrated is to desaturate your palette before settling on it. If everything looks the same, your contrasts aren't different enough for even non-colorblind people. Using different saturation levels can also solve a lot of the problems (not all of them) for the ones who are color blind, like in those puzzle games. If two colors are similar, but one is much darker, you can still tell they are different.
02:17 what exactly is colour-blindness. 03:35 Types of color-blindness. 10:55 How it affects real life. 19:05 Common colour-blindness issues in video games. 30:02 How to solve the problem. 37:53 Examples of solutions in games. 48:16 Accessibility beyond colour-blidness. 52:45 Takeaway - Key steps for supporting colour-blindness. 54:18 Thank you slide -> Q&A. =========================== Key steps for supporting colour-blindness . Don't just communicate with color. . Understand your palette/color features. . Use preview tools. . Colour-preset system. . Think about wide-reaching solutions. . Test with colour-blind players/colleagues. . Make your accessibility options accessible! . Ask for community feedback. =========================== We are #yolostudiogame on twitter - an indie game studio with two members. We are seriously learning about the game industry. So we tweet a GDC video summary every Tuesday. Happy making game, everyone!
I am making a game with only a few fixed colors: • Background • Floor • Hazards • Collectibles • Interactables • Accent (A colour that is meant to magnify the level's themes, safe to set to the same colour as the floor) Even before I watched this talk, I wanted these colours to be freely changeable, not just with unlockable palettes, but with a full-on colour picker. I originally just intended this feature to changing the contrast to something more intense when the sun is shining on the screen and maximizing the brightness isn't enough, and decreasing the contrast for better colours in darker rooms.
I didn't realize how many people were colorblind, you'd think such a hefty amount of people would be tempting for studios, there's money to be made there
One of the coolest thing with the boardgame Ticket To Ride is how the colorblind-aid symbols to help you match train cards to train tracks, are also modestly decorative, making the visual design of the game better for everyone.
subtitles help me because I have trouble processing audio and speech due in part to ADHD. accessibility stuff like this helps audiences you wouldn't even expect, or undiagnosed audiences
Yes! I'm an advocate for Video game accessibility! Colourblind features are extremely helpful and honestly should be thought about early on as to not cause headaches later on in development.
Good way to deal with this as trichromats is to have pairs of red filtered, green filtered, blue filtered or pre made colorblind simulation eye glasses. That way anyone with normal vision can play as any type of color blind player.
Thank you so much for this presentation! I am actually developing a game and I'm trying to do it color blindness friendly without it being a secondary option. I have no idea if I am being successful but at least this video has given me a clearer lead. So far, I think my color selection works and I'm excited to reach the point where I could test it with real color blind betas! Thank you again!
31:16 Exactly what I am doing in my game, creating a colorblind friendly palette for my game and to distinguish enemies from friends. Of course this is easy as colorblind solo developer :)
Excellent talk, thank you for demonstrating the problems so clearly. I would also second that you should just let the players adjust the colors themselves, because that would solve the problem for more people. Most games already let you customize controls and audio, so why not colors as well. The more people can enjoy video games the better. :)
this guy seems like such a nice guy 3:20 why is the white in the centermost area of the yellow section, and not any other colors? seeing only two colors must suck so much... 16:37 no, don't bring it back! ahhh!! very informative talk, as someone who doesn't know.
An actual in-depth talk about color-blindness unlike that ~10-15 min crap by Game Maker's (not) Toolkit. I don't know why I even bothered mentioning this man. Anyway, this was an informative monologue regarding color-blindness. :)
Call of Duty has always been completely unplayable for me, it's literally a game of distinguishing actors from a background made of brown which enemies blend into which 1 in 8 men are physically incapable of doing
I partially blame too minimalist design. For example, phone buttons and GUIs used to have a lot less minimalist with their elements, crosses used to be used for declining. I am not colorblind, but I am not dumb either.
@@awham335 Because 13% of men are colorblind, since the Gene's for the cones of the eyes are on the X chromosomes, and I happen to have the genetic condition of less cones in my eyes.
It takes a lot of effort to preview all the images with all the colorblind filters. But it only takes a little effort to preview them with just one of them. So, is it enough to only use the Full-on Greyscale filter?
I'm so confused. I fail colour blindness tests, I was told I was colour blind as a kid, but when Pennant shows the pictures of 'what colour blind people see' vs normal - they look different. So am I something else?
I can't play puzzle games like Puyo-Puyo due to my colorblindness (and none of the colorblindness modes ever seem to help). Friends of mine never really seem to quite understand and get offended when I don't want to play such games with them
@@awham335 I am deuteranomalous (green-weak). The alternate color options never have quite enough contrast between each other to appreciably speed up my ability to parse the blobs. And the shape options are generally not differentiated enough to me to be any better. It's all still vague blobby shapes. Color-wise, an ideal set for me would be Black, White, Yellow, and Blue. Shape-wise, I'd say a round concave, a round convex, a sharp concave, and a sharp convex. Like maybe a star, diamond, circle, and blobby X.
Not really. It will just make the world look completely wrong to us, and might not even solve all the problems. It's still important to understand the game you're making.
Color blind friendly features should be something that's mandated by law, because it's not that much work to fix it and it would be a huge game changer (no pun intended) for a lot of people.
No they should be not. If I create anything - then that is the way I see it and maybe it's intended to be that way. It's not something that your life depends on or some kind of information that you require as a citizen or a person. I would be glad to add features like that to my games to allow more people to play it and have a better experience. But if that would be mandated by the law - it would give quite the opposite effect from me. It's about changing mindset of people - not giving them constraints.
@@saveplanetearth9916 I'm not saying you have to limit your artistic vision, that's what's called a strawman. I'm just saying the option should be there, as you've seen demonstrated in this presentation. Just because people's lifes don't depend on it doesn't mean it shouldn't be fixed.
@@difflocktwo That's your opposition to every game having color blind options, a ridiculous strawman and slippery slope? This would improve the lives of nearly 8% of gamers, if you were color blind you'd be singing in a different tune.
i really want to learn what you're teaching but god damn the cognitive dissonance is huge when you keep refering to chromosomes as if they belong to specific genders, please inform yourself about gender studies, genetic divination regarding "men and women" harms trans people
