Why You Should Care About Your Colorblind Players

One of the easiest and biggest mistakes you can make in game design is to forget about Color Blind people. Color blindness affects mainly to the male population, 8% of the men in world have some sort of color blindness! In total 1 every 20 potential gamers are going to have problems if you are not careful. Now that's a lot! If that's not enough reason for you, keep this in mind:

Almost every group of gamers could have at least 1 color blind people at some point... keep them in mind. They will appreciate it! :D

Now that you are reading this... let me tell you how to easily avoid color blindness problems it your game!


But before we continue, it's important to understand what really colorblindness is... The most common variety is the mix of red and green colors. This is easy to imagine and catch, however, other colors that contain red or green are also confused. For example purple could be also difficult to "read" since it contains red. And this gets more and more complicated since there are many different colors that can be mixed... virtually there is no limit to which colors could be affected. There is even a variant called Monochromacy that prevent you to see any color (everything would be gray scale).


 - Should I stop to use colors coding in my games then? D:
 - Of course no! :D


It has been our players that have thought us the important of keeping color blindness in check. They also told us the very best advice to solve every color blindness problem ever in an surprisingly easy way!

Pair every color in your game with an icon. This icon doesn't have to be complicated or fancy, it just need to follow a simple rule, always place it on top of this color and always make it pure white. The contrast and the shape will make it impossible to miss!

Here I will show you and example of color blindness test we have been performing for our game Mishmash Galaxy. A good proof that it's difficult to imagine how a color blind person would your your game.

Tokens in Mishmash Galaxy

As you can see, for a person with Protanopia, red and purple would be exactly the same. Thanks to the white icon they are easily recognizable. You can do your own tests in the Colorblind simulator :)