Colourblindness in games

[Salsa Party Animal]

Could you play games in B & W mode without trouble ? Just interested to know.

[IanE]

It does suprise me it's not more catered for in games, I've known quite a few people that work in the industry that some form of colour blindness (including at least two artists).

Astropop caters for colourblind people, thankfully.

[David GP]

Astropop caters for colourblind people, thankfully.

Hexic also does. More and more games do actually.

[toythatkills]

Hexic also does. More and more games do actually.

Apparently the patterns that Hexic uses on the hexes to cater for colourblind people are not applied to bombs though, making the whole feature fairly redundant. I've not tried it, but that's what I've heard

[EvilBoris]

Perhaps it is a requirement of xbox 360 games?

[NekoFever]

If you look at DVD's and TV broadcasts, subtitles/captioning have become standard features. I think that gaming won't be a mature, mainstream medium until it is on-par with these other mediums.

One game that actually tackled this in a great way and doesn't get nearly as much credit for it as it should is Half-Life 2. As well as the usual subtitles for dialogue that pretty much every game has it actually includes closed-captioning - if, for example, there was a zombie sneaking up from behind and moaning a deaf person wouldn't hear it, but with closed captioning on you'd get "zombie moans" appearing on screen. It's been included as a native feature of the Source engine, even down to mods.

[Jay]

I'm not colour blind but find it very difficult to tell green blobs from blue on Puyo Pop on NGPC. Luckily there's an option included to change the blobs to different shapes according to colour.

Jay

[Riskbreaker]

I have problems with colours that have similar looking shades i.e. Light Green/Yellow, Dark Red/Light Brown etc. It doesn't normally affect my games playing, except for some of the earlier mentioned colour based puzzle games. I can detect the colour differences if I focus on that particular colour, but it takes so long as to make playing the game pointless.

Astropop caters for colourblind people, thankfully.

How so? I may have been missing a trick, but I downloaded the demo the other day just to see if I could play it. And it looked to me, if I concentrated, as though there were four colours; yellow, green, red and blue, although all I could actually see was red, blue and green. Is there an option to change the colours?

Hexic stitches me up as well, and puzzle bobble

[chosen_one666]

My little brother is colour blind (darks reds and greens), and he's had trouble with a few games, most notably Crimson Skies on the Xbox.

Because the targetting reticles surrounding enemy planes, building etc is dark red, and the targetting reticles for friendlies is green he has trouble telling the two apart. There was one section (where you have to shoot at the target balloons from a zeppelin as part of the marksmanship trial) he wasn't shooting at any of the balloon as he couldn't actually see the targetting reticle around the balloons he was supposed to shoot.

[Applefiend]

Well...

You are colour blind
Love is colour blind
God is Love
Therefore you are God.

I'd honestly send a few emails around, especially for PC games which are patched. Just say this colour and this colour don't work for me in this game, if you swapped it to this colour and this colour it would work for us guys. Something like that takes five minutes to fix in a game, usually.

And it'll make some code monkey's day doing a little good. They're human too, nearly.