Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The red-green blindness is the most common type of color vision deficiency, which is
a problem if we try to recall the most popular color codes modern games are using.
The green color is positive, friendly, and safe, but red symbolizes danger and hos-
tility. Friends usually are marked in greens and enemies in reds. A character's calm
mood is identified by green signals, but his fury by red ones. Another good example
is of the trajectory lines; the correct ones can be painted green and the wrong ones
red:
The player with red-green blindness does not see (or barely sees) the difference
between such code and signals. Is the character an enemy or a friend? Is the pro-
gress bar now in a red or green zone? The player has no clue. For him/her, such col-
or code looks very alike, as though he is looking at some military equipment painted
in various forms of olive drab or tan, and should spot the difference between shades.
This can make some of the aspects of the game unrecognizable and even make the
game impossible to play. This is especially true for various puzzle games, displaying
a lot of color balls or bricks. Imagine you have a Match-three game, where the play-
er does not know the exact color of each element. So he can only play randomly;
sounds weird, but it is a very realistic scenario for players with some color vision de-
ficiencies.
What do you have to do to prevent such a situation? First of all, try to look at your
game screen via the eyes of a person with color recognition problems. There are
several ways to simulate color vision deficiency. Many modern graphic editors have
some options for that; for instance, look at Adobe Illustrator's or Adobe Photoshop's
specialmenus.Whenyougoto
View | Proof Setup
,therearetwousefuloptionsCo-
lor Blindness—Protanopia-type and Color Blindness—Deuteranopia-type. For older
editions of Adobe products, there is a plugin Vischeck, which is a project by two sci-
entists at Stanford University: Bob Dougherty, PhD and Alex Wade, PhD. The plugin
can be found at
http://www.vischeck.com/downloads/
.
Another way to see the world as the people with color vision deficiencies do is to use
special applications for the iPhone or iPad. One of the popular ones is Colorblind Vi-
sion, developed by
opcoders.com
. It is very simple to use, you have to choose the
