By John Walker on August 9th, 2012 at 9:00 pm.
Don’t be fooled by the punning title, Colour Bind looks like a game that will be pretty much impossible for the colour blind to play. It’s a physics puzzlers where gravity is not defined by weight, but rather by colour. For instance, if that level has green set to up, and red to down, those are the directions in which such objects will fall. Driving a car-thing around levels with three different colours all pulled in three different directions looks, well, it looks like the trailer below.
Yup, that looks pretty tricky. And will be out “soon”. It’s set for a Steam release for PC, Mac and Linux, and I’m hoping someone else volunteers to review it. My poor brain.
(I’d have included a link to the game’s website, but, er, it doesn’t have one. Developers Puppy Punch Pro don’t even mention it on their own website, beyond one news article from March. And their press release fails to even mention the company name, let alone include a link. That’s really how not to do it, guys.)
09/08/2012 at 21:13 Natti says:
I am so goddamn sure I’ve seen this game before. As in years ago.
So goddamn sure.
10/08/2012 at 01:34 Dinaroozie says:
Natti: You might well be right. A (much crappier) version of ColourBind was made for a development competition early in 2008, but in the four years since then I haven’t always been able to work on it full time, or even at all – it’s something like two years of development work spread out over those four years. Still, it’s pretty cool that someone has heard of it from back then!
09/08/2012 at 21:47 The Army of None says:
Impossible for the color blind, you say? Well, count me out then :(
09/08/2012 at 22:31 Meusli says:
I am colour blind and after watching the video I see no problems. That may be my problem :D, but the colours are very different and I could tell between red and green which is where I would struggle.
09/08/2012 at 23:05 Ohle says:
Hey folks… I do PR on the title with Puppy Punch. In fact there will be a mode for colourblind gamers. The team’s put a lot of thought into it, and we’ll talk about it some more soon. :)
10/08/2012 at 10:42 jimangi says:
I may have trouble with the yellow and the light green, the red looks distinct enough to not be a problem for me.
10/08/2012 at 21:14 Faxmachinen says:
I’ve always wondered about this. Isn’t the computer the perfect device to cure your colour blindness? Why do you not remap the parts of the spectrum you can’t differentiate into parts that you can? Why do some colorblind people bark up the game designer tree when it’s their monitor that turns the 1′s and 0′s in their computer into actual colours?
11/08/2012 at 09:32 AppLeNaToR says:
You sir have clearly no clue what it means to have some kind of Color blindness/weakness.
09/08/2012 at 21:50 LionsPhil says:
Speak up man, stop mumbling.
Pretty neat, although I suspect I’d be turned off pretty quick by ye olde puzzler I-can-see-how-to-do-this-but-don’t-want-to-spend-all-day-failing-to-execute-it, given he says he’s targetting the people who do want to spend all day.
10/08/2012 at 01:42 Dinaroozie says:
LionsPhil: Yeah you might well be right. I figured it was best to be honest about that kind of thing, rather than try to convince people to get the game and then have them hate me for it. :)
And, sorry about the mumbling. Long ago I decided that I’d always sound weird to myself in recordings, and to try not to worry about it – I guess a side effect of that attitude is failing to notice when I really do sound weird.
10/08/2012 at 08:11 LionsPhil says:
The voice is fine; it’s just really quiet.
09/08/2012 at 21:53 Spinoza says:
I’m colour blind , so instead I will listen to a song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4m-jXuQHLg
09/08/2012 at 22:09 stahlwerk says:
Today must be international day of physics in games.
Physics!
10/08/2012 at 01:22 Dinaroozie says:
Hi guys – guy who made the game, here.
I knew going in that ColourBind was going to be a painful game to make accessible to colourblind players, but I think in the end it’s worked out okay. The biggest feedback I’ve gotten early on was that everyone’s colourblindness is a bit different, and rather than attempting to have some brilliant solution that makes the game totally playable for everyone in greyscale, it’s better to have a bunch of different features and let people mix and match what works for them.
I’ve pretty much gone with that – you can add distinct patterns to coloured objects and lasers, which is the one that seems to help people the most, but you can also invert the game’s colours and vary the intensity of the red/green/blue channels too. Also, as much as possible I’ve avoided gratuitous juxtaposition of red and green puzzle elements. :) In the end, I can’t guarantee that the game will be just as easy for everyone with the various forms of colourblindness out there, but it is at least theoretically playable throughout even by someone with no colour vision at all, and mostly the people who have tried it (mostly red/green) have said it works. If in doubt, though, there’ll be a demo. :)
10/08/2012 at 14:37 Sinomatic says:
I’m not even the slightest bit colourblind myself, but wanted to massively applaud the effort you’ve put in to deal with the issue to make things accessible.
Now what are you going to do with the game for those of us who are too dim to be able to work these fiendish puzzles out?
10/08/2012 at 02:41 pakoito says:
Bastards!
10/08/2012 at 09:21 Koozer says:
I would be so rubbish at this.