My Colorblindness and Games
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- Опубликовано: 22 авг 2024
- I talk about my rare form of full-spectrum colorblindness, that started when I was 20 years old and is getting worse. I talk about how it affects my enjoyment of games and the way I make them.
As a colourblind person, I really appreciate devs like you that try to make games more accessible for us. Thanks for the great work!
That experiment you did by desaturating the fruit arrangement was fascinating! Really puts it into perspective.
I remember you talking about losing red and then green when I was a little kid. I'm not losing color vision at the same rate, but I am losing it slowly. Having someone who's been there before has helped me a lot to not panic about those changes and to know what to expect
I’m glad I helped you. It’s not so bad, really. I mean, look at me! I still dress myself, and I think I’m pretty stylish!
It wasn't until the early 2000's that I started to notice a bigger effort to include color blind modes and closed captioning. I always look to see if they're there now. Always puts a smile on my face to see a game more accessible.
Yeah it shows the Devs care and actually think about accessibility. I game on a 55 TV and some games I've played use tiny fonts, really annoying.
@@greenwendal5056 I share your pain. At this point, all fonts and GUIs should be infinitely scalable, and the effects should be apparent without leaving the menu.
Oh, the Outer Worlds actually makes sense. It has a really unusual, but distinctive use of color that I kind of figured was just meant to be because it was old-timey and also alien, and I think it does kind of accidentally work thematically. But that's fascinating how that works out.
i have achromatopsia (total color blindness and legal blindness) and i love to play games! It makes me really happy that there are people like me in games advocating for accessible design
It sounds like your colorblindness is a curse for you as a person, but still is a blessing for you as a game developer. Or should I say - it's a blessing for all the colorblind people who gonna play your games (since all the attention and effort you put to make at least some games more accessible for them).
In recent years I have seen more and more games including options for vision/hearing-impaired people - and it's definitely a good sign!
Thanks for making so many videos!
I had a friend who had full-spectrum colorblindness and he said he could figure out colors if he stared at them for long enough. I never really understood what that meant, but your picture actually made his explanations and experiences suddenly click. A whole lot of discussions I had suddenly made sense in an instant because of that photo. Thanks for the insight.
I remember reading an interview with someone from Interplay and he said that someone else was working on a GUI for a game and it was horrible.
Now I know!
And I found the interview. It was with Scott Campbell. It's in Russian but here's a rough translation of that part:
One day Rusty (Rusty Butcher, Расти Бючер, I have no idea who that is, I tried googling but found nothing) showed me around the office and introduced me to Tim Cain, sitting in his office. I noticed that he's working on the new Bard's Tale (Bard's Tale Construction Set) but what really caught my eye - was the color palette of the interface. All menus were brightly colored in all different colors - bright pink, brown, and lime. I asked Tim about the palette but he didn't understand what was the problem. Later I found out that he's colorblind and everything looked perfectly fine for him! That was my first lesson that the programmers shouldn't do the graphics for their games.
I love how you were able to demonstrate how colors looked to you while being colorblind. Very resourceful.
Also, you version of colors looks like old pencil sketches in instruction manuals.
In medical school they said that pressure on the optic nerve affects color vision first, I hope your ocular pressure gets controlled regularly!
I’m so glad you made this channel and talking to us personally Mr Tim. I thought this video was personally very interesting. My grandfather on my fathers side has lost his colors idk which but sounds the same. I never knew till I was like 12 and he got all the grandkids camo bracelets. Came home with like 10 pink camo and my grandma just laughed and said Ted! These are all pink! And he was like how the hell was I supposed to know??? And it was so funny cause we only have 1 girl in our family. And none of us boys wanted them, anywho hope I don’t lose my colors… lmao
The colorblind mode for AW was an absolute nightmare (but a great learning experience).
Glad that Glenn and Chris kept the grayscale mockups going! I've done the same post-Obsidian. Not just for UI, but also branding & marketing materials. It's a simple strategy that helps ensure as many people as possible can enjoy what you're making.
Very interesting topic Mr. Cain. Please keep doing videos, I think they are very compelling and enjoyable.
I am so glad you made this channel Tim! I could listen to you talk for hours I swear.
I'm very sad to see this, I'm not an artist by trade but in my spare and secret time and color loss is an existential fear I have. Kinda a mild fear as it's on the cross roads between my fear of memory loss and sight loss.
I just want to let you know that despite what you've lost, you've brought a lot of color to my life. Thank you for all the work you've been involved in, truly hope I can give to the world as you have.
It is so interesting that you mentioned bringing home green bananas all the time because by my understanding the best current theory about the reason humans have such a massive range of color vision when so many other animals lack most colors is that our ancient primate ancestors that lived almost entirely in the trees and were almost entirely herbivorous gained a massive advantage by being able to distinguish which leaves and fruits were most nutritious by observing their color.
Geez, I wish UI design like yours would be standard practice, would save so many people headaches! That's so great!
I am partially collar blind all my life. Yellows and greens are hard and purples and blues, and whites and pinks. My wife once said she wishes she could see the world the way I did. I laughed and told her “I’ll tell you exactly what it’s like. You say something is a color and everyone around you gives you a weird look, and then they laugh at you for a very long time.”
I did not know that adult-onset color-blindedness was a thing. This is useful to know when I teach cartographic and graph design. I might link my course webpage to this page as a way to help students imagine their possible audience.
I have a similar experience as a colorblind developer though I’m just starting out in my career. I also see blues pretty well, and have done a similar picture with the fruit for my friends. I started my own company and as the lead of a small start up, I end up doing a lot of work in every area of the development pipeline. Due to my issues with colors, I do a lot of copy and pasting of hex codes instead of RGBs for shades I used to see when I was a kid.
Thanks Tim, just wanted to throw in that as I recently played the Outer Worlds I actually came across one issue with the colors that might not be apparent for your level of color loss but was a bit frustrating for me who has a different level. When you look at an item that you can pick up/steal the text fades in over a short period of time to say take/steal and the name of the item. When the text is fully faded in I easily tell just from the color of the text if this is something I'm free to pick up or if it counts as stealing because the take text is brightly colored and the steal text is darkly colored. So even though I don't actually know which color the two texts are I can tell they're different by the brightness. The problem is that during the fade in animation both texts are dark so often I found myself having to wait the extra second for the fade to complete so I could gauge the action or manually reading the verb which is kinda annoying with how much stuff you can pick up in the game. Great game though, just a minor color issue I experienced.
I remember I had to quit one or two games out of frustration because I couldn't tell friend or foe on a minimap. I think one was one of the DOTA games. I have trouble with certain shades of green/red/brown. I'm always happy to see a colourblind option even tho I think it should be standard by now. Thanks for talking about it. Oh now I remember the red/green science in Factorio was sometimes headache.
This is really insightful for me (pun intended). I myself suffer from deuteranopia and have always struggled with PvP games, mainly with the colours of the friendly and enemy players and I can't begin to imagine how see in your daily life even though you showed us an example image. Thank you for spreading awareness on this topic, and just general accessibility in games. Since I have started making games, I've made it a promise to myself to always include as much accessibility as possible. For my first game, I didn't do any of it but I was so caught up in making a game I totally forgot. You talking about it reminded of that promise I made to myself, and I hope I can put more effort into that for the future, and I hope accessibility comes to every form of entertainment, not just games.
I am also colorblind and this creates some interesting situations at work, especially because I've dealt with it for so long I sometimes don't even think of it as an issue. I've been dealing with it for so long playing games that even as a developer, I forget to think about it as an issue.
Edit: Yours is far more extreme than mine!
You worked on Wildstar?! 😮 I didn't realize that. Please tell more Wildstar stories. That game has a very warm and welcome place in my heart and it seems mostly forgotten.
Great video as always!
This is an interesting topic to bring up. It's something I dont find myself thinking about much, but I think you really put into perspective how important it is to be considered in gaming.
Fun story!
I’ve been using greyscale settings on my phone for a year and so many things are invisible when I’m on webpages, mobile game, etc.
It’s very interesting to see the digital world from that view point.
Great video!
Thank you so much for sharing this. There are soooo many “hidden” disabilities, and because we don’t talk about them much I think people don’t realize how common they are. Talking about it more allows people to get more comfortable with topic and better realize it is a natural part of life.
It’s the one “minority” that any of us might become a part of at any moment.
I've already known about your colorblindness, but it was interesting hearing about it in greater details. Thanks for sharing, it was inspiring.
Now I'm going to make designs in greyscale before adding colours to make sure they still work that way. Thanks for that tip.
Thanks. This was the first time in my life I got described what colorblindness means and what the struggles are those people have. WIll take this in account for my next game.
I always appreciate when a dev throws in a colorblind setting filter.
Earthy colors can be a real pain (reds,greens,browns,etc) -- mostly only effects me when it comes to UI/HUD.
Only been a real problem in multiplayer games when I need to quickly identify enemies.
Also loot rarity can be a problem too. Especially in ARPG and such. With the green/yellow/orange. Modern titles tend to have setting to change though.
In Diablo 4 I could tell legendaries/rares apart on the ground, but once in my inventory it was a mess. They all looked the same.
The severity of yours is interesting.
tim seriously just wanted to say thank you for just being yourself thank you for the great games and memories youve given me and i really enjoy your stories and video’s lately !
Another fascinating video. I really appreciated in particular the fruit picture, what a great way to illustrate the condition. And damn. Our bodies can suck so bad sometimes.
I wasn't even aware that your type of colorblindness existed. I definitely understand why it made your artist sad to realize you can't see most colors.
Color blind modes are awesome and I'm glad they are in more games. I am not colorblind in the slightest but I do like using the modes on subsequent playthroughs of games sometimes just to see the interesting, differently colored interfaces
Very fascinating kind of color blindness. I'm not color blind, but in some games I still turn on a color blindness mode, because some games are just so full of effects and stuff, that focusing on the important parts becomes very eye straining. These modes can help in that regard too.
Not sure if you've heard of Pirate Software, they recently blew up on RUclips, but he's talked about how they develop their games to be colorblind friendly without a colorblind setting the same way, partially because someone on their team struggles with it. They've got a demo for his RPG Heartbound on Steam and he streams live a TON during the week. Definitely nice seeing developers working to make games more friendly for all types of folks. This video is great info. Thanks.
It was great to hear that about The Outer Worlds but it was a shame there was no easy to way to switch off Chromatic Abberation and Motion Blur in the game though. Even I had issue with motion sickness (I never did before) and had to edit some files to turn off some settings. Hopefully that's a lesson learnt for The Outer Worlds 2.
Thanks, Tim. That's was interesting! The way you came up to show us using the desaturation is fascinating!
You brought up a very important matter. We are all Gamers and we should all be able to be a apart of the same adventures or stores. Thank You for that.
My uncle is Color blind and we played RDR 1 back when it came out . He was like, where's the trail that shows where to go, and I said it's right there on the map? The map is green, and the trail is red, so he just saw all green. They didn't have a color blind mode back then as far as I'm aware.
I’m colorblind, and the biggest thing I hate about games is when you do the colorblind option and it changes the colors of the landscape but the waypoint and objective makers are still red/green. Like who the hell designed this shit.
Dead by Daylight is a prime example. They (the devs) made a colorblind option for players after years of asking for it, and they only changed the colors of the scenery. The objective markers are a dark red and being that the game is horror focused I have to strain my eyes so much to see the red objectives because the color red being used is so dark.
After the change the community complained again and asked why not make the objectives the color blue or another color that is more easily visible, they said because it would be an unfair advantage to color vision people. So fuck us I guess lol
Thanks for the video! It was a great watch!
This is great info for game designers everywhere. It's awesome that just making your UI in greyscale can help inform the decisions that you make to relay information. I'll have to keep this in mind for my own projects!
Thanks for sharing this Tim! I remember this topic popped up somewhere before but I never realized how exactly the world looks for colorblind people. I have "regular" issues with my eyesight, I use contact lenses too, but in the mornings I don't wear them right away, and sometimes my wife gets pissed I can't see things. Sometimes it can be a good excuse not to do chores though haha
It's nice to hear that the industry is evolving when it comes to games accessibility. I had a really hard time playing The Outer Worlds because it often left me feeling motion sickness. It was a bit frustrating because I was really into the game but couldn't play long. Usually disabling things like motion blur, DoF, head bobbing while also increasing FoV solves this for me, but the game wouldn't allow me to change some of those settings (I played on a XBox Series S). In your opinion, is this also something that the industry is taking more into consideration nowadays?
Really cool story, I'd like to hear some more. "Press the green button" got me dead😭😭
common red green here. i dont remember ever have issues with outerworlds, really brilliant.
building from grayscale is a good idea. not having to select “color blind mode” at all is a great kindness to players.
I love how many accessibility options are in games nowadays, I don't even struggle with anything like that but I always turn on subtitles and options that skip/make qte's less tedious, like in God of War I immediately turned on the option to make prompts where you have to mash a button to just be holding it down and so on. Frankly anything that makes huge narratively complex games accessible gameplay wise to people is great in my books!
As a man with colorblindness and a family history of macular degeneration, thanks for the heads-up.
I feel a bit sad, I was born colorblind, so this has always been the world to me, but I feel sad your world has changed. I know, intellectually, that red and green are basically the same color, wavelength wise, and that yellow is the single brightest color across all visual acuities (school bus yellow, and it's used for exactly that reason) but also that blue overpowers all my other color senses, so it's interesting that your blue vision is still active.
It's nice to have someone else who's obviously done their research in the genetics and biology of it. Thanks for not just putting in the effort to make games accessible, but also providing good techniques. The monochrome UI idea is perfect and easy to modify from prototype to final.
Also, Dark Age of Camelot had - - - to +++ for their enemy ratings, and I think that's why I always found it so much more pleasant than WoW. It's annoying how often games make me guess what the UI means. Or they place a filter over the entire screen that makes things both unplayable and ugly. The world is the world, the UI is the key.
Thank you Tim. That was very educational!
Hope you are having a good day Tim thanks for the upload :)
"Let's keep an eye on it"
Ayyyyeeeee
Thank you for the great, informative video!
I was playing Battlefield 3 when it came out--it was the first game of its type that I had played--and the multiplayer drove me up a wall. I couldn't tell where I was getting shot from and I couldn't distinguish between teammates and enemies. Then I discovered the color blind option and subsequently discovered my own colorblindness. Crazy to think I went through 20+ years and never knew.
Wow that is fascinating, I had no idea color-blindness could be inherited and passed on, or that it could develop in adulthood!
Great video! My cousin has something similar to your experience he has lost the ability to see most colors. It is common for the men in our family. For females they wind up with a hyper color sense. I also have a friend that only sees in black and white. Video games make it hard for colorblind people.
So, uh... I'm watching this late at night and my phone has this feature that turns the screen to shades of grey when it's getting late, so I'm going to have to rewatch this tomorrow 😅
I was also born colorblind, A lot of colors that are similar such as greens and reds and yellow and oranges I have trouble differentiating. I completely get your frustration playing games when the characters are so camouflaged with the background or trying to differentiate between enemies and friendlies.
Thank you.
I really liked how accessible the outer wilds is
Oh my goodness ;-;
what's up with people who just instinctively _do not believe_ someone when they say that they're disabled in some way - what an asshole!
Also, painting in values is the big big big recommendation on how to make your art much better from all the digital artist friends that I have
Doing UI in values is absolutely ingenious - should I ever make a game with coloured UI, it'll be something that we absolutely prioritise!!!
I've met several people with partial or severe color blindness and I'm aware of your challenges. Several gene related therapies are supposedly in development and should start testing soon.
Did you try out those glasses a few years back, Tim? Or were they too generic in their approach? Do you remember what colors were like before your perception of them changed?
I have tried a pair of EnChroma glasses, and it was really cool to see richer colors again, but the glasses were quite expensive and I didn't like their fit (I have a very large melon-like head). And yes, I remember a lot of colors I have not seen in years. Lemon yellow, fire engine red, deep purples, almost any orange shade...
I didn't even consider this until a player of my puzzle game back in 2000 or so said they couldn't tell the difference between two pieces. I had never considered it before.
I had a friend maybe 10 years ago with some kind of colorblindness that made it hard to distinguish between red and blue at a glance. I met this friend in the community for a competitive team fps game, and she was a really high level player. But it was kind of funny hearing anecdotes from her about getting confused and chasing down a teammate and wondering they just wouldn't take damage - assuming she was missing every shot until they ask her wtf she was doing.
I remember laughing at that, but also having a moment where I realized I take certain things about UI and the way the world is designed for granted.
Funny, I first played Fallout on a Mac laptop that was grayscale and it worked pretty well
This was very enlightening
Is there any way you could do a live game development stream? I do game dev as a hobby, and I'd love to hear your insights and see how you work.
Hi Tim, there is program iris pro that can change colors of windows, games, mac system etc, there are many modes for saturation, grayscale, it can help You
9:20 Oo, the TF2 method!
I'm not sure if you're already aware of this, but simply desaturating colors in HSV (or HSL) space (or adding saturation as you explained it) can actually still change the perceived brightness of the color. For example, a full (0, 255, 0) green color is actually much brighter than a full (0, 0, 255) blue color, even though they have the same HSV Value of 100.
You mentioned the story about the pallet used in the video where you and leonard played through fallout for about 3 hours.
My Dad is colorblind. One day I asked him, "So how does the Sunset look to you?" And he said "Grey" and that was one of the saddest realizations I ever had :(
In my area sky is usually battleship gray.
Did you ever tried EnChroma glasses or other brands?
I think it's interesting that in our modern society where such a big deal is made about being inclusive and trying to accommodate people that certain facets of human existence are just totally ignored. Try being tall, for instance. Nothing is made to accommodate you, instead they constantly cater to short people. And I'm not even that tall.
as somebody who’s colorblind, thanks
Honestly helps me understand my fathers colourblindness more
❤💚
I don't know if you will see this. But could you give me the image saturation values of that image? I would like to take some pictures and desaturate them to see how you see the world.
I think it's great a lot of games these days have accessibility options for color blindness and hearing disabilities. What I find odd though is that more and more games release without key rebinding, which used to be pretty much standard in games. Key rebinding is essential for physical disabilities. I rebind keys in every game for personal preference, but I have a friend with a physical disability that can't play some games because he can rebind they keys. Sometimes what's more frustrating is that the game lets you rebind the controls, but has some hard coded, which often ends up being on that he needs to change.
As a fellow colorblind person (albeit not anywhere yours) some of the time it can be somewhat difficult to play some games (Donkey Kong 64 - Blueprints/Bananas, Mario Kart - Red/Green Shells, Mario games (/smash bros) - red/green/good/bad mushrooms) ....
OH MY GOD I JUST REMEMBERED THE STRUGGLE OF WOW I FORGOT ABOUT THAT
My friend is color blind and when we used to play PUBG without color blind mode he always had trouble seeing enemies being hit, because of the red blood splashes on the green surroundings.
Interesting, grayscale first, then color. If it works in grayscale, it will work in color too.
Accessibility is important.
Edit:
I'm losing hair at a rate I don't like.
Possibly inherited :(.
it’s a pity that healthy people don’t think about it, probably it’s not “economically justified” enough .....
by the way, there are special glasses for color blindness, maybe they will help
If I wanted to ensure a game I'm working on is easily playable without any effort to a colourblind person, is it enough to make sure it's playable with complete colour desaturation? Or is it good practice to test all the most common/likely colourblindness types?
I don’t want to speak for all colorblind people, because there are a bunch of different kinds of color blindness. But mine is pretty severe, and the color desaturation method worked great for us in The Outer Worlds.
@@CainOnGames Thank you!
8:02, so Fallout was using 256 color palette right? And it was fixed palette I imagine? But it all makes sense now, I had thought about Fallout's somewhat unusual color palette which I love.
Yeah color blindness baffles many but for me it’s just life lol
Gained a bit more respect for people with colour blindness after hearing this. Artists train themselves to understand brightness of colours in greyscale because it helps with painting.
It's one of those things that can be really easy to overlook. If someone's missing a limb, for example, we can kinda imagine how that would affect things. We can get that *wrong* and have blind spots, but there's a place to start. For colorblindness there's so much we do instinctively that even when trying to account for it without doing methods like his grayscale test we can completely miss what still works and what doesn't.
Which is why it's important to make things like that part of the workflow, part of the design process. Have a step in there that's explicitly "test for XYZ accessability," don't just assume you'll keep it in mind as you're doing everything else.
I wonder how is it different to be colorblind and look at real life colors versus monitor or tv colors.
Have you ever considered getting those newfangled eyeglasses that supposedly "fix" color blindness? No clue how legitimate those are but it could be neat
What a silly problem to have in 2023. This can all be solved by integrating a color filter into the graphics pipeline of every console and PC OS. With a little Ai you should be able to map any color to any possible kind of colorblindness there is after giving the user an on-device vision test.
random memory: used to joke with friends how ishihara color plates are used to test if one by any chance is using a bot 🤡(e.g. to bypass drivers liscence med test)
I can't remember the name of it but my specific type of colorblindness means I have extra green color perception but reds are very dull
Edit: oftentimes I will mistake reds for browns and greens
Is that why the power armor helmet you have is in red?
Is a cruel thing to happen to someone so creative at least you have your imagination to compensate.