Color Balancing Update

Salve, Anima!

Today we wanted to share our progress on a minor change to the game what we expect to have a major impact – color balancing! While we have a groundwork for our color pallet that we are going to stick with, such as Team Light minions being blue and Team Dark minions being crimson or maroon, we want these colors to make sense and harmonize with each other. It is not enough for this game just to “look pretty” – it needs to be aesthetically comprehensible in addition to being aesthetically pleasing. As a result, we are always looking at how we can improve the colors of the models and environments to provide the best gaming experience possible, and based on the feedback we received, the next steps forward were to balance the colors of Ice Lane and the colors of each team’s minion waves.

When designing the lanes in Ethereal, we knew wanted the elemental aspects of a Fire Lane, an Ice Lane, and a Void Lane to be front and center. Since the Fire Wyvern, Ice Wyvern, and Atropos are the most important objectives on the map outside of each team’s Elder, we wanted to emphasize their importance by making each lane the respective domain where these creatures reside. We felt that we did accomplish that goal with the bright color pallet we originally used for Ice Lane, but we also saw that these colors could be too overbearing at times, which made this section of the map strenuous and unpleasant to look at. Without sacrificing our vision for Ice Lane (pun intended,) we added more diversity to the colors by making the whites less vibrant, reducing the amount of white used on detailed environmental pieces like rocks and trees, and increasing the amount of light blues and greys around these environmental objects to break up the amount of a single color that appears on the map at any given frame.

The minions for each team also needed an overhaul in their color scheme for two big reasons. While the minions looked fine already and could still be distinguished from each other by most of our players, there were instances where players noted that minions blended into the environment too easily, namely how Team Light’s blue minions could blend into Ice Lane and how Team Dark’s crimson minions could blend into Fire Lane. Since we knew we were taking the opportunity to fix the colors in Ice Lane, we took this time to adjust the colors of the minion waves to further differentiate them from their environments. The second reason we looked to adjust the colors of the minion waves is because player accessibility is very important to us, and we wanted colors that players with visual impairments, such as color blindness, could recognize more easily. Even though we do already have functional color blindness filters in our graphics settings menu, we still felt that improving the current pallets for the game’s base graphics settings would only further improve player accessibility by making everything look and feel better across the board, and not just by relying on different filters to achieve a specific desired effect. We tackled this issue by adjusting the brightness and saturation of the minion textures until each type of minion looked good across both teams and across all three lanes, so that all players will have a pleasant and consistent experience during the laning phases, regardless of which role they select.

Examples of the color changes we made can be found below. But to really see these changes in action, keep your eyes peeled for our next open test announcement, which will feature an improved version of the game that has these changes and more improvements to come!

Thank you,

Undying Games