Welcome to our third developer diary! Today we will be taking a look at how incorporating colorblind accessibility has profoundly changed our approach to our game design!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1858650/In_Sink/
It was only after we released the Prologue for In Sink that we started to realise that some of our community members were having issues with the colors. Many of these players were either colorblind themselves or were playing with colorblind friends, partners, or family members, and they were finding the color-coded puzzles to be very difficult as a result. We wanted to resolve this issue and make In Sink a more accessible game for colorblind players, but we also wanted to retain the fact that our game was language-less. The big question was: What else could we add to our puzzles to help players describe certain elements to each other without using language in any way?
The answer was to add numbers and symbols!
Now everything that has a relevant color also has a symbol and/or a number associated with it, so the game can be played entirely without describing a single color!
The symbols in the game are in a 4x4 or 3x3 grid with the inspiration coming from the game Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. They are easy to describe so as to not add an additional challenge for our colorblind players. For example, looking at the symbols and numbers featured in the images below, “two diagonal lines” or “Lever number 8” are both two simple ways to summarise what you are seeing.
In short, we wanted to give players as many options as possible for describing what they are seeing to each other, rather than limiting it to colors only. This has changed the way we approach the design of our puzzles and has brought up even more interesting discussions, such as how people describe certain symbols, why they choose to describe them in that way, and what signifiers do people naturally default to when solving puzzles (i.e. do you prefer to use the colors, the symbols, the numbers, or a mixture of all of them?). Rather than limiting our puzzle design, it has opened up new avenues for consideration and has left us with even more to talk about in future dev diaries!
Looking for your missing piece to the puzzle? We’ve got plenty more for you to sink your teeth into. Don’t forget to wishlist In Sink, join our Discord server, and follow us on social media!
