A colorblind friendly city builder: palette, text size, less motion
A city builder is read through colour: green means good and red means trouble, on every map layer and every ✓ or ✗ in a house card. For many players red and green are nearly the same colour. Glyph Dynasty now has a colour-blind palette, a separate text size and a quieter picture for anyone whose system asks for less motion.
Colour-blind colours
With deuteranopia or protanopia, which together affect about 6% of men, red and green run together. The setting Interface → Colour-blind colours replaces them following the Okabe–Ito palette, a set of colours chosen to stay distinct for the common kinds of colour blindness:
- green, “good”, becomes blue
- red, “bad”, becomes a vermilion orange
- yellow, “middling”, gets brighter, so it differs from the orange in lightness too
This covers the map layers, such as fire risk; the outline and ghost of a building while you place it; the drag of a road or a row of houses; the ✓ and ✗ lines in cards; and the bars of goals and ancestors. The patterns and symbols of the layers stay as they were. Colour only helps; it never carries the meaning on its own.
Text size
Interface → Text size has three steps: 100, 115 and 130%. It is separate from the interface scale and enlarges only the letters in panels and windows, so you get bigger text without giving up map space to bigger buttons. The buttons of the tutorial scroll grow along with the text. We checked it at 1280×800 and 1920×1080. Every menu screen also fits the window without scrolling from 1280×720 at 100% scale, in all five languages.
Less motion
If your system is set to reduce motion, the game follows it:
- rain, snow, smoke and dust stand still instead of flying
- the cloud of locusts stops swirling, though it still moves along its path
- at dusk all lanterns light at once instead of in a wave through the streets
- festival lanterns hang without swaying, and there are no fireworks or firecrackers at all, so no flashes
- Show glyphs switches at once instead of with a wave, and interface animations are off
Weather, Disaster effects and Festivals also have their own switches in the settings, for a quieter map without touching the system.
Remembered, and only a look
Both new settings are remembered between sessions, and neither touches the simulation: your city, saves and co-op games are exactly the same with them on or off. If the dark glyph map is hard on your eyes, the art style can be switched to Ink, dark brushwork on light paper; and the Detail setting keeps the game smooth on weaker machines.
These options came with the work on the first ten minutes of the game. If something is still hard to see or read, tell us: the ways to follow the game are on the home page.
Glyph Dynasty is coming to Steam for Windows, macOS and Linux. Watch the clips, read about this in the development history and see this part of the game; for journalists there is a press kit.