My Colorblindness and Games

tim-cain colorblindness accessibility ui-design fallout outer-worlds game-development

Abstract

Problem: How does progressive colorblindness affect a game developer's ability to play and design games, and what practical design strategies emerge from that lived experience?

Approach: Tim Cain shares his personal history with adult-onset progressive full-spectrum colorblindness — from diagnosis at age 20 through decades of worsening color loss — and describes how it shaped his approach to UI design on titles like Fallout and The Outer Worlds.

Findings: Designing UIs in grayscale first, then layering color on top (preserving value differences), produces interfaces that are inherently accessible to all forms of colorblindness without needing a separate colorblind mode. Standard red-green or blue-yellow colorblind filters often don't work for atypical cases.

Key insight: If a UI reads clearly in grayscale, it works for everyone — regardless of what kind of colorblindness they have.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHUAFYDzN3U

Tim's Colorblindness: An Unusual Case

Tim Cain has adult-onset progressive full-spectrum colorblindness — a rare hereditary condition traced through his maternal line that affects both men and women (unlike typical X-linked colorblindness). He had full color vision as a child and teenager, but began losing colors starting at age 20.

The progression was tracked through Ishihara plate tests over the years:

  • Age 20 — missed 1 of 38 plates (first noticed during a routine eye exam for contacts)
  • ~Age 22 — missed 3 plates
  • ~Age 24 — missed 5 plates
  • Mid-50s — missed 26 of 38 plates, roughly half his color vision gone

The loss is not cleanly red-green or blue-yellow — it spans the full spectrum, though he's held onto deep blues longer and lost reds and greens earlier. Pastels were the first to go. His siblings all developed the same condition later in life; his mother lost color vision in her 50s, and his maternal grandfather was colorblind as far back as anyone could remember.

Everyday Life With Progressive Color Loss

Tim describes his vision as something like desaturated watercolor or sepia. He demonstrated this to Rob Nesler (art director at Obsidian and formerly at Interplay during Fallout) by desaturating a photo of colorful fruit in Photoshop until it just changed for him — the desaturated and original versions looked identical to Tim but dramatically different to Nesler.

Practical impacts include:

  • Buying a brown shirt that was actually green, and an orange Disneyland shirt he thought was tan
  • Difficulty picking ripe bananas
  • Traffic lights at night requiring positional memory (top = stop), which broke down in Texas where lights were mounted horizontally
  • A grocery store cashier telling him to "press the green button" — he had to ask which button she meant, and she repeated "the green one" until he explained he was colorblind

Impact on Playing Games

Tim's colorblindness has made many games frustrating to play:

  • Out of This World (Interplay) — Used a pastel-colored copy protection wheel. Tim failed the check three times and told the executive producer they couldn't ship it that way. The producer thought he was lying. They shipped it anyway.
  • World of Warcraft — Before the colorblind mode was added, crafting recipe difficulty colors (green/yellow/orange/gray) all looked the same to him, so he couldn't tell which recipes would give skill points.
  • WildStar (Carbine) — The art director designed creatures that camouflaged into backgrounds. Tim could barely see them. The art director justified it as naturalistic; Tim argued they were making a fun game, not a realistic one.
  • Armored Warfare (Obsidian) — He kept shooting teammates because he couldn't distinguish green (friendly) outlines from red (enemy) outlines.
  • Skyrim — When players complained it was monochromatic, Tim thought it looked just as colorful as any other game he played.

Standard colorblind settings (red-green, blue-yellow filters) typically don't help Tim — they produce hideous colors that are technically distinguishable but visually repulsive.

The Grayscale-First Design Approach

Fallout's Palette

On Fallout, Tim managed the color palette using RGB values directly. He noticed art director Leonard Boyarsky wasn't using certain blue and yellow color ramps — Boyarsky was reserving them for the player's Vault suit so it would visually "pop" against the rest of the world. This is the origin of the iconic blue-and-yellow Vault suit.

The Outer Worlds: Designing for Everyone

For The Outer Worlds, Tim implemented a deliberate accessibility strategy: all initial UI work was done entirely in grayscale. UI artists Glenn and Chris were told they could use anything they wanted — as long as it was gray.

The process:

  1. Design all UI elements in grayscale
  2. Verify Tim could play the game with grayscale UI
  3. Layer color on top, preserving the value (the V in HSV) so grayscale readability was maintained

The result: The Outer Worlds shipped without needing a colorblind mode at all, because the UI was inherently readable regardless of color perception. If it worked in grayscale, it worked for every type of colorblindness.

The Broader Accessibility Argument

Tim frames this as part of a wider push in the industry toward accessibility — larger font sizes (The Outer Worlds added font size options and expanded them post-launch), subtitles, and Microsoft's adaptive controller support. His core philosophy: no player with vision, hearing, or motor disabilities should have a diminished experience of the game.

The red-green paradigm (enemy = red, friendly = green, health bar transitions from green to red) remains the most common accessibility failure in games. Tim advocates for moving beyond color as the sole differentiator — use shape, position, size, and value contrast alongside color.

References