DESIGNED FOR ACCESSIBILITY
They coloured outside the lines
tint.
A calming colour-mixing puzzle
When Jakob Lykkegaard was creating his painterly puzzle game, Tint, he asked a long-time friend to test an early version, figuring it would be helpful to get a fresh take on the project.
But his friend apologised when he realised the game was all about blending colours, recalls Lykkegaard. “He said, ‘I didn’t tell you, but I’m colour-blind.’ I actually didn’t know.”
Lykkegaard and his team at Bangkok-based Lykke Studios didn’t want Tint to exclude the estimated 300 million people in the world with some form of colour blindness. So they got to work.
“We’re in games because we like to create beautiful things and solve small problems,” says Lykkegaard. “This is just another problem we had to solve.”
Most games that offer a colour-blind mode swap out certain hues to make numbers easier to read or enemies easier to spot. That wasn’t an option with Tint. To solve its levels, you strategically blend watercolours – blue and yellow to create green, or red and blue to create purple, for instance.
So Lykke Studios added a visual element that builds on the game’s underlying aesthetic: pattern. With colour-blind mode toggled on, a grid of squares appears with blue strokes, for example, while dots pepper the yellow ones.
We went through three or four different kinds of patterns before we found the most aesthetically pleasing and functional.
And these patterns blend together as harmoniously as their hues. Mix blue and yellow and you get green with dots nestled beautifully inside the squares.
As elegant and simple as the solution may seem in retrospect, it didn’t come easily.
“We went through three or four different kinds of patterns before we found the most aesthetically pleasing and functional,” says Lykkegaard. “It was tricky to get it to look natural.”
What Lykkegaard and his crew assumed would require a couple of days work turned into three weeks of experimentation, fine-tuning and playtesting.
All of which was time well spent, says Lykkegaard.
“We wanted to create a game for everyone, and we can’t really say it’s for everyone if we’re leaving people out.”
Subscribe to Apple Arcade to start playing Tint. To see more of the over 180 games you can unlock with Apple Arcade, check out the Arcade tab on the Mac App Store.