[Accessibility] Alchemy & Colorblindness

Hi! So I just started playing, and the game looks great, but I’ve run into a pretty big problem. I can’t consistently do alchemy! See, I’m colorblind, and several of the colors in the cauldron look pretty much identical or similar enough as to be functionally indistinguishable. While I have managed to make a couple very simple healing potions, it involves a lot of guesswork and wastes a ton of ingredients. Looking back through the forums here, there was a post about this 2 years ago, but it looks like nothing was done about it. This is kinda a big accessibility problem, especially given how common colorblindness is, and would help with clarity for color-sighted players too. Fortunately, it’s also pretty easily fixed!

There’s a handful of ways to solve this. The easiest is to just list the name of the color on the side of the cauldron or something, but that generally looks pretty bad. The standard solution, and the one that I think is most effective, is to include a shape of some sort, whether it’s making use of existing magic runes or some other method. This could be done in the pot itself, as a marker on the rim, or somewhere else, but it’s important to show the shape in the recipe if you do it this way - typically by just showing the rune in the correct color in the text. You could also give some sort of audio indicator, though it’d have to be fairly distinct, so that seems more difficult.

Other suggestions I’ve seen in the other thread that wouldn’t work are non-obvious things like “how hard the pot is bubbling.” Color is distinct, easily-recognizable, and doesn’t require much extra explanation, and a good solution to this problem would be similar.

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Hi, we appreciate the feedback and the different suggestions - I will bring them up and see how we could improve accessibility in the future for these.

With regards to sound effects you mentioned, we do use them currently (alongside a bubble visual effect to indicate a color change), are they not useful or do you mean a different SFX for each color?

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This is also a problem for some with temple boss 1 and 2 since they use colors and there are no sound ques to use to know where to go or what mist phase you are on unless someone calls it out. Its not the worst but could be improved a bit.

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I’m not even colorblind and I rely on others to tell me what color it is cause everything in temple just looks grey to me

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Yep, I mean a different one for each color! I usually can tell that it’s changed, if only just by the bubble effect, but I don’t know what it’s changed to, and sometimes it feels like changes quickly enough that the two bubble effects end up overlapping and I’m not sure if it’s changed once or twice. That said, if you use SFX as your primary indicator, it needs to be:

  1. Obvious - subtle effects will be missed.
  2. Continuous, or at least repeated, so you can “check” to see what color it is even if something else happens (for instance a loud car drives by). This one is easier to solve than the others though since you can just have some kind of button that outputs the current sound, though in that case it should probably be something easy to trigger while holding ingredients in each hand without taking your attention off what you’re doing.
  3. Highly distinct, both from background noises and from other color-indication SFX.
  4. Easy to communicate via text, since the journal uses that exclusively.
  5. Specific and difficult to misunderstand (ex “it makes a church bell sound,” but not “it hisses”) and even then only if it’s the only color that makes any kind of sound like it.

Because it basically has to have all five of those at minimum to be effective if it’s an SFX-only indicator, I personally think shapes are just simpler and more straightforward. I think SFX is better used more as a secondary indicator, but again that’s personal preference. I can also imagine other visual indicators, like a tiny assistant pet next to the cauldron that tells you what color it is (and other useful info?). That could also be accompanied by audio indicators like speech, but somehow I doubt getting a VA in just to record the names of several colors is an effective use of resources. :stuck_out_tongue:

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There should be an option for color blindness so when activate there’ll be caption for some problematic part.

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I like the Rune Idea , Have a smokey Rune come out of the Cauldron for each color tier.
Have those Runes on the Ceiling too. ( also in the Recipe book. )

this^ … just make it a toggle under display for colorblindness, if enabled it will just pop up colors as text into view and into the log window. This way you can use it in various parts of the game that has color cues and its really easy to implement.

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Another idea to throw onto this:
Not just bubbles, but maybe dense groups of foam(perhaps even just on the edges of the inside of the pot where the water touches), small ranging to larger amounts of vapors coming off the pot at higher heats?

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