Foogod

Hi all, Just passing through, so feel free to ignore me completely if you want to, but I was looking over this thread because it was interesting to me and thought there were a couple of things that might be useful to point out: First, I think you guys are really kinda overthinking this color-selection thing a bit. If you provide a default pallette, and then allow users to customize it themselves, I don't think it's unreasonable, or likely to be a problem, to assume that anybody who goes through the trouble of customizing their own colors should realize that their "blue" may now not be the same as other people's "blue" when talking to teammates. I know some gamers who do this on other games and don't seem to have a problem with it. Second, keep in mind that you're not the first folks to try to tackle this issue. There are actually quite a few resources out there on how to make visuals (and even games in particular) color-blind friendly (actually, just doing a Google search for 'color-blind game design' pops up quite a few interesting links which you might want to read through) Third, speaking as somebody who is color-blind, and knows folks of various degrees and types of color-blindness (and yes, there are different degrees, in case anyone was wondering), a couple of rules of thumb: 1. If you can take your game and translate it into grayscale and it's still playable, then you're pretty much guaranteed no color-blind person will have a problem with it. You don't have to go that far, of course (and it may be difficult to go that far), but it doesn't hurt to try it and see how close you are (and can show you whether there's some areas you need to look at in more detail, or some areas you really don't need to worry because you're fine) 2. The substantial majority of color-blind folks out there are red-green color blind, and most of them are only marginally so (they can see reds and greens just fine, it's just a little confusing when you start muddling them together in various degrees). You can go a long way by just making sure that (a) you try to stay away from reddish-greens or greenish-reds, off-yellows, or multiple shades of brown, and ( try to make colors with red/green/yellow/brown in them distinctly different brightness (i.e. you might use a bright-yellow with a dark-red, rather than mid-green with mid-brown) 3. Keep in mind that color-blindness really only affects about 4% of the population (though there are some studies that suggest it may be a bit higher in some groups, and some of those do tend to overlap with gamers, but still we're probably looking at less than 7-8% worst-case). I definitely think it's worth trying to support color-blind folks (particularly since I am one, and it isn't usually that hard), but don't let choosing just the right color scheme take huge amounts of development time that could be better used making the game as good as possible for the other 92% of the players out there as well. My recommendations: 1. Choose some established color-blindness-friendly pallettes for your defaults (Googling 'color-blind pallette' should pull up a few) 2. Give users the option to change their colors on their own screen if they really want to (as I said, don't worry too much about communication issues.. I really bet there won't be many..) 3. From time to time, take some screenshots and put them through a grayscale filter and see how much of the important stuff you can still read. If you do those three things, you're already way ahead of the game compared to most designers, and your game will probably be just fine for the majority of the color-blind people out there.. --Alex