Comment on Anon wants to stop the mad painter
Empricorn@feddit.nl 3 days ago
O.P.T.I.O.N.A.L.
I genuinely don’t know why this is a debate. There are intentionally difficult games that have accessibility features. There are games that don’t cater to everyone out of the box, but a simple toggle on the pause screen enables colorblind mode, etc.
If they’re already putting yellow paint in a game or considering it, just spend an hour of development time giving players the choice to disable it and literally everyone wins!
just spend an hour of development time giving players the choice to disable it and literally everyone wins!
As a senior games programmer, depending on the engine and a ton of other very game-specific stuff, I’d guesstimate that anywhere between a 5 minutes, 1-man job and a several days long task potentially spanning multiple poles (mostly thinking of LD, 3D artists and tech artists. And obviously programming and UI)
Even fixing a single typo is not a 5 minute 1 man job if you take the full task (issue tracker to commit, potentially time tracking,…) into account.
Did I low-ball it? Possibly. But even by your estimates, that’s absolutely nothing in the years-long endeavor of creating a game. Especially considering the development resources that went into putting yellow paint into the game or engine in the first place! And just like other accessibility features that can be toggled on/off, the more they are implemented, the more efficient the mechanisms for enabling and disabling them in games… Like I said, everyone wins.
Randomguy@lemm.ee 3 days ago
Not really. Yellow paint isn’t a thing for shits and giggles, it’s there to make the game readable.
Before yellow paint, games needed to have good art direction (instead of “realism”) or good environment design to either make it clear something is meant to be interacted with or to point the player in the right direction.
Simply removing yellow paint doesn’t suddenly improve art direction or environment design, it just makes the game needlessly hard to read.
Empricorn@feddit.nl 3 days ago
Who… are you arguing with? Did you read any of my comment at all? The yellow paint is already here to stay! I’m saying give the players the choice to enable it or not. That’s all! They’re putting it in the game anyway…
Randomguy@lemm.ee 3 days ago
You?
Yeah?
And I’m saying that by giving a choice at all, you’re already failing the players that don’t want it. Aka, not a “everyone wins”.
My point is that yellow paint isn’t bad because it’s ugly or breaks immersion, it is bad because there can be good design that communicates the same thing without being ugly and immersion breaking.
Removing the former doesn’t suddenly bring the latter into existence.
I’m arguing that it shouldn’t.
todd_bonzalez@lemm.ee 2 days ago
“It’s not enough that I can choose not to have yellow paint, I should be able to choose for everyone else too.”