Is colorblindness generally considered when developing games?

My team and I are getting close to the point of releasing our first mobile device game and it occurred to me that it may not be colorblind friendly. I researched colorblindness a bit and found that approximately 7-10% of the population is colorblind, which means 7-10% of potential customers may not be able to play the game without visual issues making it potentially unplayable.

Is it common in game design to cater to the colorblind or is that generally ignored? If it is common are there resources available to help determine what color schemes would best work to eliminate the issue?

In my research I found this page, but it just has a couple of comparison photos. What I'm more interested in is something more akin to a chart showing a color vs color comparison of the full spectrum.

Any advice is appreciated!

 

Only if the game requires colour to work, much like subtitles may be required to assist deaf people.

It should not be for aesthetic reasons, any more than changing the audio for deaf people: the variation in colour blindedness (and spectrum) is too diverse.

 

I don't think there really is a magic colour scheme that you can drop into your project. Do testing with colour blind people or simple image filters. If you run into problems, adjust the hue or the luminance until it goes away. If that doesn't work, you can almost always solve it by adding secondary information (numbers, text, icons, shapes, hats, etc.).

Colour blindness isn't particularly diverse. Every individual has slightly unique vision, but they break down into a few common categories. Test deuteranomaly/protanomaly first, and then deuteranopia/protanopia if you really want to cover your bases. You can test for tritanomaly/tritanopia as well, but that is relatively rare. There are also rare conditions which cause monochromacy, but that is probably beyond the scope of what you can design for.

The potential audience is too big to ignore so I would make this a standard part of usability testing.

 

Well, supporting color-blind people is a topic for sure, TotalBiscuit for example says that he would like to see it become a standard here at around the 24:30 mark. Now, as a Unity user I sure would like to support color-blind people, but I just don't know how.

I'm pretty sure a Unity Asset Store piece that provides a fire&forget solution could become a good seller, since a lot of devs would want to just include it.

 

http://amplify.pt/unity/amplify-color/ or https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/13919 both do tone mapping (second one for mobile). First one is easier - you just use a texture.

 

Red/green colourblindness is the most common form (the others are pretty rare) so if you are using red vs green as a visual marker in your game (eg, to show a button is off or on) then it might be a problem - particularly if the tone (brightness) of the colour match. In the puzzle game I'm working on, the background is greyscale, but the puzzle elements are coloured - usually red or green. As the colouring is done through materials and lights, it was pretty easy for me to put a red/green colourblind option in the menu to toggle between red/green and yellow/blue.

Bottom line: how important is distinguishing between red and green in your game? If it's really important, and it's easy to fix, consider adding a toggle option to change it/ or use a different colour scheme. (portal used orange and blue for example)

 

I myself am Red/Green colorblind (my uncle was 100% monochromatic). From a games perspective, I usually don't have any issues. There are certain shades of green that look completely gray to me. Deep reds and browns look the same, Purples and blues, dark yellows and oranges, so just make sure there is a good balance between your colors and you should be fine.

There are certain match games that I've struggled with (Bejeweled for example) because I can't always tell the difference between similar colors, at least not in a timely fashion. Another example from a different genre was one of the Final Fantasy games (I think Final Fantasy X). There was one area where there was a side mission and you had to catch some butterflies... but only butterflies of a certain color. I couldn't tell the difference between them and I would constantly catch the wrong one and end the mission so keep those kinds of things in mind. Even if you do introduce mechanics like that... allow for some fault tolerance so it's OK to get some wrong.

 

I think the simple answer is to hook up to a display that is capable of going black/white then have someone play the game (or create a script in the game to set saturation to 0) if there's any fundamental walls you hit with colour recognition it should be a pretty easy process to rectify.

 

My advisor in graduate school wrote a paper this subject called "Color-Defective Vision and Computer Graphics Displays"

http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~meyer/papers/meyer-greenberg-cga-1988.pdf

Its worth a look at to formalize the concepts.

Another important note is that the term "color blind" is inaccurate and that there are multiple types of anaomolous color vision. Depending on the type, different types of colors will be confused.

For example this may cause problems with people who have (the very rare) tritanopia and tritanomaly deformation (blue-yellow):



The simplest most straightforward way of dealing with this issue is to have a strict rule that any information can not be coded in color alone.
For example if you had identical green and red icons/powerups/laser blaster fire/etc, then you would need to create some other way of distinguishing the elements. I suggest the following alternatives.

1) Brightness
2) Size
3) Texture
4) Shape
5) Etc

Depending on the theme of the game, you can combine them to add to the style of the game. This has the added benifit of being more intresting to people with normal color vision.

For example these games used the theme of fruit as an alternative to just color:



Dr. Clement Shimizu

 

I always wondered why it was claimed dreams are in black white when I dream in color? And also I wonder about claims that dogs and most mammals see in black white? How do they know? If they are showing a dog different colors to get a response it could be dog just don't care. Also bulls are supposed to be enraged by the color red.

 

The colour processing part of our brain is separate from the luminance processing part of our brain. The colour part evolved much later than the luminance part.

Colour tells us WHAT something is, luminance tells us WHERE something is.

We can navigate the world fine without colour. We can see what surface is brighter than another surface, so we can create depth and direction. This part of our brain is also much faster at processing than the colour part.

Colour gives us clues about what something is. We can look at a piece of fruit and tell if it is fresh or rotten depending on the colours. We can look at someones face and see if they have flushed cheeks or skin discolourations as signs of health. We can identify the condition of things using colour. Colour is processed slower than luminance.

So, what you should do is make sure the luminance rendering has enough contrast to allow the player to accurately navigate the space. If you put a bright surface on a bright but different colour background, there is no difference in luminance and a colorblind person (actually anyone) is likely to smash into the bright surface. Put a white surface on a black background, and a colourblind person will see it clearly. Increasing luminance contrast on areas of focus also improves navigation for people with normal vision.

You can have a better sense of your scenes overall luminance contrast two ways:
1) Squint your eyes when looking at the scene.
2) Take a screenshot and change it to grayscale in Photoshop.

I could write a lot more, but if you focus on luminance your world will be easier to navigate for everyone.

You can look up colour-safe palettes for colourblind people but it won't help much if your luminance is flat.

 

You have to ask yourself is it worth putting in the extra effort and time to make it colourblind friendly just to gain only a 10% larger audience. Some extra reading http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13054691

 

Well now that you mention it most games are unappealing to me no matter how fancy the graphics because the seem flat. The minimal games I do like focus on luminance or maybe that wasn't intended but I do like those games better.

 

Thank you so much. I've been meditating that kind of stuff for long time. "Colour tells us WHAT something is, luminance tells us WHERE something is." I was almost there, but newer got it

Please, write a lot more! Here or a separate thread, or personal msg..

And for OP: Not sure if you need to worry about this too much. After all, how many ppl you know, who have complined they cant play a game because colors are bad..

 

Well I actually have...and colors that make a scene look flat should concern a game developer - that's where overdoing the graphics starts to make no sense and why many big studios purposely set their games in a darkened area with one or more areas of luminance. To create a luminance with which to escape by, to create a hall to escape through. When the same scene in bright light would seem flat, busy, and entrapping - lol, like your typical big business cubicle or giant room full of desks environment. Schoolchildren and office windows are looked out of to daydream for good reason you know. OK< maybe the big game companies make such dark scenes because they're ghouls but the luminance does give the player a 'sense of hope to escape'.

Restaurants are very careful about choice of colors - many yellows, oranges, reds and fewer if any greens and blues. Yellows, oranges, reds - to excite and blues and greens to calm.

 

When it is important to be able to know the colours, I test the graphics by setting a copy of all the textures to greyscale and seeing if I can distinguish them. Of course it is easy to test this in Unity, just make sure you keep backups of the normal textures.

In addition I will try and give as many non-colour identifiers as possible to back up the colours.

 

Low contrast lighting has its place but is a killer for action games.

One of the worst offenders for this is racing games. If you see a game where people crash a lot, it is probably because the corners are lit incorrectly.

A tool that can create these situations are automated daylight systems. Everyone oooohs and ahhhhss when they see real-time cast shadows and changing time of day. But what they don't realize (or care about) is that you have now changed the lighting on every single corner constantly. You better be a hell of a good designer to make levels that work from any direction of lighting. Especially at high noon, with the sun directly overhead, you are going to have more lost players and crashes simply due to the lack of strong shadows and contrast. But it's just too sexy to see that moving sun so people will use it even if the gameplay suffers.

Lighting can also affect your sense of speed. Ever play a racing game and the speedometer says 200 km/h and you feel like you're dragging through mud? This is due almost entirely to a lack of contrast in the lighting. A favourite gimmick that people fall back on is "60 FPS!" 60 FPS is nice because it affects the SMOOTHNESS of the game and handling of the car, but it does ZERO to affect our sense of speed. I can name a dozen car chases in films shot at 24 fps that feel much faster than the average video game.

Art that communicates clearly is an important part of gameplay. Without clear communication, your gameplay suffers. People who dismiss art's role in games haven't thought about stuff like this.

 

A lot of big games put effort into making them playable by color blind people. A Google search will bring up quite a few articles:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/02/01/w...s-see-simcity-with-simulated-color-blindness/
http://www.gearboxsoftware.com/comm...box-adding-a-colorblind-mode-to-borderlands-2
http://www.destructoid.com/ramblings-of-a-colorblind-gamer-72229.phtml

I'd say the easiest way to do a quick pass and see if your game is playable by color blind folks is to put a greyscale filter on your camera and play in black and white. If you can easily tell the difference between everything then that usually means you're fine. If not, then make the things that look too similar different brightnesses so they are discernible in greyscale, or different shapes or whatever.

 

I'm glad you pointed luminance out - I think now it should play a bigger role in the design of my environment and characters than color and I am about to start designing a level on a very simple game that would have looked flat without special effort.

I remember the old Atari video arcade game 'Pole Position' - the edges of the race track are white red strips.

 

Thanks for the replies guys. After reading all that I'm not going to worry myself over it much. It was definitely nice to hear from someone who's actually colorblind. Considering what I've read here I'm just going to screenshot things and grayscale them in photoshop to make sure nothing is invisible in that mode. Luckily we have nothing that actually depends on color.

 

I have issues with color. To make your game color-friendly, try the following:

* High contrast, between objects
* Use outlines, halo's, or backdrops to separate foreground from background
* Avoid similar colors for similar objects - most yellows/greens are hard to differentiate
* Avoid dark on dark - red on black is the worst offender and is near invisible to many people.

See the theme? However you do it, high-contrast is the 90/10 solution.
Gigi

 

I've created an asset to simulate all relevant types of color blindness:
xCBM: Color Blindness Master

It's brand new. More features are planned.
Feel free to give feedback and suggest further features.

 

Well I checked my computer monitor and no B&W mode and while there is a high contrast B&W mode on Windows that applies to UI elements and not the content of games.

Myself I'll play the game on my TV in B&W mode to test for colorblindness for Blue/Yellow or Red/Green. Basically 3D games should be easy to overcome colorblindness for but it's not as easy for 2D games especially busy ones.