SimCity’s creative and art director Ocean Quigley has explained that the upcoming simulator will have three different colour blindness filters, since it’s important to properly decipher the stuff shown on the screen in different colours in the game, and in making sure that people have no difficulties with it, Maxis has made the UI much better.
“It’s not just a game where you’re running down a hallway trying to shoot anything that moves,” Quigley told Destructoid. “It’s a game where there’s always data embedded in the environment — the environment is a UI. The environment is trying to give you feedback, and if you can’t make out the cues because they’re color-based, then it’s just much harder and less pleasant to play the game.”
Quigley actually worked on this with Maxis’ Quality Assurance lead, who is colour blind himself. “I made a little filter that made it so that I can see what he sees,” Quigley explained. “So I made a filter that emulates what it’s like to be red-green color-blind so that you can see the game as somebody who’s red-green color-blind, and you couldn’t make out a thing! The industrial zones and the residential zones, which are green and yellow, were one in the same.”
Well, it certainly sounds convenient.
SimCity releases in March for the PC. Stay tuned for more info.
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