Colorblindness

EDIT: Now that this game is actually playable, I've created a colorblind accessibility mod. Check it out! http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php?resources/colorblind-friendly-interface.75/


Hello. My name is Sykes. As I mentioned in my introduction, I am colorblind, as well as my entire family. A few of my siblings have slight variations to the type of colorblindness the rest of us have, but we are all avid gamers. Many times we come across some games that are difficult to play (Terraria, Super Meat Boy, all Worms games), sometimes impossible to play (League of Legends, Fractal, Call of Duty) because of our colorblindness. More often than not, the game has some sort of colorblind option (Altitude, L4D), or takes precautions in those kind of things (Global Agenda, Planetside 2, AirMech) so that the game doesn't require a colorblind option in order to be playable by everyone.

I was heavily involved in the development of AirMech in assuring the game remains colorblind friendly, particularly because they are eventually going to add green and yellow team colors on top of blue and red. I know it can be difficult to determine what, in a game, would be hard for a colorblind person and what wouldn't be, so I would like to go through a few examples so, hopefully, Starbound can be perfectly colorblind friendly. I would also be willing to provide input on anything you guys create that could potentially be hard for a colorblind player.

Let's cover Terraria first. Terraria only has minor inconveniences.

Terraria is a wonderful game, and the game is fully playable from start to finish (and beyond) even if you are colorblind. Unfortunately, there are a few inconveniences along the way that can make things difficult. First off is differentiating ore that isn't perfectly lit. Much of the ore was impossible to tell apart when using colored lighting, or if using a spelunker potion. Silver and Iron looked identical, Gold and Copper, Adamantite and Cobalt, and Mithril was only distinguishable because it had a unique pattern to it. This wasn't a game-breaking deal, but it required mining directly up to an ore using standard (non-colored) lighting in order to find out what it was, which made Spelunker potions almost useless because even if you could see ore through the walls, you still had to mine up to it in order to find out what it was usually. If colored lighting is enabled, all similarly-textured ore is very, very difficult to tell apart even while mining, particularly silver and iron, or gold and copper. I usually have to break a few and find out what's dropping before I figure it out.

On top of that, the green and yellow teams were hard to tell apart from a glance. Darkening the green team to more of a "forest" green, or "hunter" green, and making the yellow a bit more vivid would have solved the problem, but again this is only a minor issue. We just made a rule that we weren't allowed to use green and yellow team at the same time.

Also, the cursor couldn't be any single color to fit all needs. No matter what color we chose, we would always lose track of it in the colorful scenery. If it were blue/purple, then it would blend in with the sky and corruption far too easy. If it were green/yellow/orange, it would blend in with the grass or dirt too easily. If it were red, we couldn't see it at all because our red sensors are malfunctioning. If it were black or white, it wouldn't stand out enough. A simple solution would have been to make the cursor contrast, like being white with a thick black outline. Dota 2's cursor is a perfect example.

Now, Call of Duty (particularly Modern Warfare 2). This game is almost impossible.

In every single possible way, the teams are stupidly impossible to tell apart. Fact. I can't even tell you what color the teams are. Green and red? The shades are all that matters when you're colorblind, and the two shades of the teams were FAR too close together. I would shoot every team mate, because the names were so freakin similar, and the outfits weren't a dead giveaway. All opponents and team mates looked pretty much identical. If I took my time and I was confident I was looking at a team mate, I could compare the shade of his name to others, and when I saw a darker shade, I would shoot it, but if I saw a name by itself, I could not tell you what team he was on. I could only tell who was on my team by cross-referencing who I am looking at, to where my team mates are on the map. If I saw a dude, and there was no arrow on the map near there? Shoot it. Unfortunately this required me to glance at the map every time I saw somebody, often giving me a serious disadvantage in the firefights, and causing me to die all the time or shoot EVERYONE, including team mates.

Free-for-all was the only option, because in team games... I would just kill my team mates or hesitate and die. The colors in this game were far too washed out, and there were hardly any visual indicators of who team mates were and were not. Halo did not have this problem. Didn't matter what color the teams were, if they didn't have an arrow above their head, you shoot them. Simple as that. Something as simple as a tiny arrow over a team mate's head, or ANY kind of visual, non-color based indicator, made the game playable instead of terribly frustrating for a colorblind gamer.

Next game: Peggle. This game is a perfect example.

Peggle is impossible to play if you are colorblind. Fact. To be honest, I had no idea there were purple pegs in the game when I first started, and the red/green pegs blended very well and I had to stare at the screen for a loooong time to find those buggers. I tried playing the first level and said "This sucks" and gave up. Then I discovered a colorblind option in the options screen, and hooooly crap. Lifesaver. It made all of the blue pegs a bit darker, all of the red pegs more vivid, and added very identifiable textures to the purple and green pegs, making all of the important pegs stand out clearly, colorblind or not, and the game immediately became incredibly fun and addicting. Prime example of how something so simple can make or break the game when you are colorblind.

Final example: League of Legends. This game makes me want to stab my eyes out.

First off, they added a colorblind mode... and it did not help. I will get to that later. So, League of legends... Overall, it's fairly easy to play (colorblind-wise), but there's one critical problem. The red and green healthbars... Look nearly identical. Yes, yes, you might be thinking "But they're red and green, just like any other game?" but the problem is that the shades are too close together. Take a look at this screenshot of a team fight:

Both my brother (who is sitting next to me) and I have to stare rather closely at this picture to see which are the bad guys, and which are the good guys. The only way I can really tell who's on my team quickly is the actual character model... And unfortunately, in League of Legends, both teams can select the same hero, which can be VERY confusing. Even the icons on the map have green and red borders around the portraits, and those are not vivid enough either. It can be extremely difficult to play this game well. I will often use abilities on team mates, not notice an enemy running straight up to me to kill me, or fail to save my team mate who was dying because I thought he was an enemy. It was very frustrating. The green health bars and the red health bars both look like a very pale shade of gray almost. The brain gets confused when it detects different colors of the same shades when you're colorblind, so although they are different colors... They are very similar in shade.

So yeah, a colorblind mode was released! Whoop-de-doo! Everyone praised Riot Games for helping the colorblind people out... But unfortunately, all that praise drowned out the actual colorblind gamers who were not helped at all because of this. They changed the team colors of the green team to a cyan (green-blue mixture), and a very light shade of it. Well here's the deal: A large majority of colorblind people have difficulty with red and green, because the most common colorblindness is either the absence or malfunction of the "red" cone, making red look, often times, gray. Particularly this shade of red, which is not very vivid. Now tell me, what is cyan? Cyan is a mixture of green and blue, and what is white? Well, white is an equal mixture of red, green, and blue, and gray is just a darker shade of white. But if you're colorblind (in this case), you can't see red as well, right? So white without red looks... cyan, right? And because it's not a very bright shade, it looks... Gray. So essentially, the red looks gray, and the cyan looks like gray, which means it's even harder to tell the teams apart. There is a lighter colored team, and a slightly darker colored team, and it's just CoD MW2 all over again.

Yet, Riot Games received tons of praise for taking a step to help the colorblind, when it actually made it harder to play for most of the kinds of colorblindness people have. They merely changed the shades of color without making them any more vivid (which is the best way to help), and they added no visual indicators or markers to help show who's on what team. It was very frustrating. A simple fix would have been to increase the saturation of the healthbars so that the faded green became a vibrant green, and the faded red became a vibrant red. There! Problem solved, no colors changed, no need to retexture every ability. I used a third party colorblind "mod" (just a small texture to replace) that did this very thing before the official "Colorblind support" patch came out, and it worked just fine.

Anyway, I think those examples are enough for now. I hope some people found this educational, or inspiring, and I am willing to provide feedback on any parts of Starbound that could potentially make the game difficult to play if you are colorblind. If you are unsure, take your ATI/NVIDIA drivers, turn all color off (or down to 10%), and try playing the game. If the game is impossible, then something needs changed.

Have a nice day, ladies and gentlemen, and I really appreciate you taking the time to read this, even if you just skimmed over it and landed at this last sentence. Take care, and feel free to ask me any questions.

 

Read the whole thing.. what if there were different team color options for the different types of colorblindness?

 

I'm not too worried about the team colors in Starbound, if they're anything like Terraria. In fact, there's nothing in Starbound that they have released that could potentially be a problem if you're colorblind, but this post is supposed to be informative in case they do implement a color-based feature.

 

I'm not colorblind, but I think that if they implemented something for people who are, that it would be great.

 

I hope the developers read this post.
I would feel very bad if I got to experiance something amazing, but
other people couldn't due to something they're born with.

 

As explained, sometimes it doesn't take a whole "Colorblind" mode to make it work, sometimes it takes just a little bit of re-thinking, similar to how Halo's little triangles above team mates can make the game playable for colorblind players, yet isn't actually a "colorblind" feature. It's just part of the game. If it weren't for those triangles, Halo would be ridiculously hard to play if you can't tell the teams apart using color.

Simple things like that.

 

One of my best friends is color blind, so I get where you're coming from. Hopefully they take people who are into consideration, a small change can help.

 

i expected the post to be a whiny cry baby thing from the title but after reading it all i can honestly say this was very informative as i have a slightly colorblind friend and your ideas/enhancements could benefit her expierence in star bound thank you sir for not only voicing your opinion but informing us non color blind folk of what its like to be colorblind i hope starbound is as fun for you as its going to be for the rest of us fans

 

I appreciate your honesty, and sincerity! I'm glad I can be of assistance. I definitely hope I'm speaking for all colorblind gamers out there. The devs behind Starbound are bright people, and I'm sure they'll make this game as colorblind friendly as possible!

 

Well, I'm not colorblind, but I've met the same problem with ores in Terraria. I think that different textures could solve this, but honestly, I not consider it as a big trouble; just another one gameplay element, which adds a kind of.. intrigue, maybe? I mean, you're like "Oh, what a shiny thing i see there...let's get closer!" and so. After all, hardmode ores must be hard to find, no?

 

I'm partially colorblind myself.
Yellow and very light green are very hard for me to tell apart.
I only remember one or two games that I couldn't play due to it, but it's been annoying in a few.
Mostly in puzzle games, although it's also horrible when trying to read the map on some RTS games.

Blue and purple can bother me, too, but that is extremely rare.
I seem to tell them apart only marginally worse than most people do.

One big mistake that all too many devs do is that they separate things only by color.
For example in many puzzle games the objects are large enough to have symbols inside them, but instead they are often all identical except for the color.

In the above screenshot they could have easily put symbols behind the big level counters.
They could have given each faction their own symbol and used them there.

Also many games don't allow you to change the colors for life bars etc. yourself. Why not?
Not only is it super useful for color blind people it's also fun to use your favorite colors.

 

Luckily I was given the ability to see quite clearly, (Though my left eye is legally considered blind without my right) but I see your point. Perhaps if there are team type things, rather then different colors, it could be different fonts? Say one persons name is "Pwnzerlolz1!!" And another persons name is "Thewinningdude" or something along those lines? Of course colors would go with the fonts, but fonts could make it easier.
Or even better yet, teams could have insignia's stating which team they are, as for other things, ores could maybe have different outlines and properties or something.

 

I never thought of using different fonts! That's an interesting idea.

 

In my opinion colours for the fonts would make it even worse since it can be changed so that their names blend into the background. Also with the fonts sometimes it can be incredibly annoying since some fonts are extremely hard to read since my eyesight isn't the best.

 

Why not just having something marking what team someone is? Something as simple as:
Sarzael (G)

To mean that im in team Green

 

This is very interesting. I'm not colorblind myself, but I do have a number of friends with similar issues. One of my friends can't see red at all, so telling the difference of teams would be very difficult. I've just never thought about it. I'd be all for a colorblind-friendly option!

Would team shades like this be good?
Green
Red

 

It would be quite simple for the Devs to implement something like that into this game to assist people who are colorblind.Something that i find funny is that on Modern Warfare 3 is that they implemented a colorblind mode for people that changed the colors to light blue/cyan,and a deep orange/red, and even though I'm not colorblind I use the assist mode because the colors are not as straining on my eyes.

 

I'm not colorblind and I would love to have this (or a team insignia). A lot of times colors denoting allegiance go completely over my head.

 

I agree 100%. I also have suffered from a great array of games which do not accommodate for color-blindless, and therefore are rendered unplayable for me. I don't think colors are going to be a big issue in Starbound, but even still it is something to be mindful of. As you said with Terraria, it's not a big deal in that game either, yet I do have trouble telling ores apart at times. (Especially in the underworld, where copper looks like a slightly less-shiny gold).

Oh yeah, and don't get me started on simple bubble shooting games where you have to match 3 of a color.

Just keep a big enough contrast between any times where it's essential to tell colors apart. It's really not that hard to do, so I wish more games would be conscious of this.

 

Even though I'm not colorblind, in Terraria, I still can't tell silver and iron apart.

But yeah, all games should have colorblind mode, specifically one that actually works.