Yesterday evening I reworked the site a bit. There is new a logo text at the top of the page and things are a tiny bit cleaner all-around. Also, I’ve designed an icon that is based around the general shape of the wand’s headpiece. This icon will be used in a few places on the site, as the launch icon for the application, and as a a loading screen symbol (animated). All done in the lead up to PAX East, of course. I’ll be sure to cover my table and business cards with these logos.
I spent much of the past two days tweaking the wall textures for the game. At first I upped the resolution on the base texture to 2048 x 2048. This made things look better, but greatly increased the amount of memory being used for textures, and blew up the game’s file size. The final texture atlases were over 160 MB together. I’m trying to make this game playable on as many platforms as possible, so to have this big texture loaded into RAM at all times is unacceptable. So, I reduced the resolution of each texture type (there are 5 now) to give me atlases that are a quarter of their size at full resolution. It won’t look as good, but it will get the job done.
The variation of the textures is in part to help the colorblind get through the game. User Znack told me that the green bricks look exactly like the red bricks to someone with dichromacy. As a response, I’ll be splitting each of the 11 brick types among the 5 texture types. I will be careful to make sure that colors which are often confused are given distinct textures.
Finally, I did an interview on Monday with the guys at ShortWaveRockin. I am my usual awkward self in this one! Went off on a weird pedantic biology rant for a few seconds too as a bonus. Thanks Alex and Johnny!
Not quite what I said but close enough. Just now I went to the forrest area in the web player to check again and looking at them from a distance I can easily tell which are the self retracting green bricks, but the red ones the trees are rotted in could have been another shade of green if I didn’t already know better, but the colors are still in shades that at least I personally can easily distinguish from one another. For that reason I’ve never had a problem in that area due to my dichromacy.
As long as you can tell which bricks are which It doesn’t matter what color they are, having diffrent textures will make things even better and I look forward to seeing a build with them in use.
As for the new icon you’ve made I must admit that at first when i saw it as the little picture on the browser tabs I thought it was a magnifying glass, which had me puzzled, but then i saw this post and the bigger version of the icon and then it became clear what it was.
Ah okay, thank you for clarifying. Still, still that sounds like a substantial problem. What if the player has lower contrast on their monitor or other color/shade variances? Would that matter? I have no clue really. Also I cannot predict for all forms of color-blindness, so texturing would be the way to go. In any case, I appreciate your help!
The icon pretty much is a magnifying glass with the gyroscope in the center. This was intentional. I was also thinking of making a logo out of the 6-vaned windmill. But I am fond of this particular wand design.