COOKIES, FOR BREAKFAST?

This week in Ephemeral Tale, we have another quest! To access it, you'll need to have unlocked the zone I put in the game way back in Major Update #2: the Sunken Summit. If you haven't unlocked that yet, there are rumors that there's a magical sea-shell that can reveal a path to a long-lost civilization, hidden somewhere long occluded.

We also get to talk about accessibility, and how color choice plays into that when designing/revising menus! Let's hop in, shall we?

Ephemeral Tale 1.14.1 Changelog

• A new traveller has ventured to the Respite, Jesse!
• If you’ve unlocked the hidden Sunken Summit zone, he’ll seek your assistance
• Once the quest has been completed, you can farm for the new equipment piece (if you want a different roll) by fighting Ariella in the Sunken Summit
• Fixed an issue with graphic layering in the Corrupted Castle
• Fixed an issue where companions wouldn’t properly scale to the players current level
• Fixed a bug where certain encounters could remove the Tome of Lost Knowledge from the players inventory
• Cleaned up the presentation of vendor shops
• Enabled error logging to a local file (found in install location/www/)
• If you experience a crash or some other sort of issue, please email these logs to contact@dawdlingdog.com or reach out through other means (Discord, Twitter, forums, etc)

I CAN SEE, I CAN FIGHT!

When developing a game, one of the things that I try to keep in mind is the idea of accessibility-- in many cases, this is easy enough to just think about. "Can this be done in less button presses? Do we have any timing restrictions here? Does this require complex input (i.e., multi-finger touch on mobile, LB+RB on controller, etc)?"

One area that this is incredibly complex to view through this lens is color, and colorblind settings. It's easier to design with this in mind from the outset, but isn't always necessarily possible.

As you guys (hopefully) know, Ephemeral Tale is a combination between a JRPG and a looter (i.e., games in the vein of Diablo, Torchlight, Destiny, Borderlands). When I launched into Early Access back in January, the design was still quite experimental in many, many ways-- one of the biggest differences between then and now was the loot system. In order to be "colorblind friendly," I relied on both color grading (white -> green -> blue -> purple -> orange), but also a "level" system that was strictly meant to help those with some form of color impairment by representing that same information via text. White was "Lv. 1," Green was "Lv. 2," so on and so forth.

This system would have been fine, had the design stayed that way, but one of the issues that crept up and needed to be addressed, fundamentally meant changing the way that gear was visually presented. As gear shifted to being "leveled" like a more traditional looter (where loot drops within a range of your level, and newer drops improve in total stats as you level up), this meant that the only clue left was the color grading. Seriously-- when I say the game has changed a ton in Early Access, I really do mean a ton!

Now, to be clear, there are plenty of ways that you can address this through iconography: maybe the border becomes more intricate, maybe there's a filter of sorts applied to parts of the border, you know-- stuff like that. In fact, Bungie does great work with this in Destiny, and you can see some of that right here, and over here is a great talk they gave at GDC a number of years ago. The bits at 18:50 on help shed some light on some of the "tricks of the trade" that they used for their iconography, and you might even spot how some of that is in Ephemeral Tale.

There are also other things to keep in mind as well during this process, the most important of which is color choice.

It's incredibly easy to get so used to how something looks, that you can't see the forest for the trees-- I'm guilty of this, even with Ephemeral Tale. Take for example, the gear menu:

This is how the menu had looked for quite some time-- in fact, it wasn't until Major Update #4 that this look changed! Let's examine this through a different lens, however, using a free tool: GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP.

GIMP is a free, open-source alternative to other, more expensive image editing suites. It also has a "Color Display Filter" tool, that can be accessed like so:

This filter is incredibly helpful when trying to determine how legible your colored items are to people with different viewing capabilities than your own. For example, that same menu from above, when run through a deuteranopia filter now looks something like this:

Uh-oh.

See, this reveals a few glaring issues! The Barkskin Chestpiece and Swiftstep Boots are entirely different rarities, but their color when viewed through this filter is practically identical-- additionally, the ability text (the red text underneath the flavor text, describing the ability) practically disappears into the background. Considering that the abilities are one of the more relevant features of any given item, it's important to be able to catch that at a glance.

I won't bore you with the details (as it was mostly through sheer trial and error, and consulting with artists [Thanks, Tim!]), but after many, many attempts of tweaking colors, I arrived at this configuration:

When filtered, that same image now looks like:

It's taken me some time to get used to the new color schema (and I plan for further changes in the future, in order to continue to boost legibility across the board), but it's a change that I'm happy to have made. No one should be unable to enjoy in our shared hobby of gaming-- regardless of boundaries, it's our responsibility as developers to ensure that our games are as accessible to everyone as they can be. Sometimes, that's harder than it looks, and I hope that this brief glimpse into some of the tools you can use for your own projects sheds some light on the ever-growing discussion around the topic.

As always, I hope this week's Pupdate gave you a better understanding of the development process, and that I've adequately shown how much effort goes into things that aren't immediately evident. The development of Ephemeral Tale is an on-going discussion between us as a community-- it's just as much your game as it is mine. So whenever I can make a change that helps bring the fun we have to more people, I'm going to make an effort to do so. We'll talk again next week, but until then, stay safe, and have fun!

-- Ryan
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