Developing Huecube: Simplifying the Colour Guide

The Colour Guide

Extremely early on in Huecube's development I put together the Colour guide -- A HUD element that is designed to convey information about the current colour of the player cube, and help discern what colours it can become.

The original design

The first iteration of the Colour guide I strived to make it look satisfying and simple, and in my view it perfectly illustrated what I intended it to do. It shows every colour in a compass-like arrangement, and the colour that the cube is currently will be rotated to show under the centre arrow.

When you were any primary colour (red, green, or blue), the colour guide would show the two compound colours you could become from this one. The way it was handled was by showing a slight colour-glow near the edge of the colour you wanted to be, for instance, to become magenta from red, you'd need to add blue (as there is a blue glow visible from the magenta crescent side).

When you became white, the guide would cycle around nonsensically to indicate that you had all colours at once, which worked fine but doesn't really convey what white actually is.

A misunderstood system

Interestingly I found that many players trying out the game couldn't grasp how the game's colour system worked, and the colour guide should be helping to verify that.

In Huecube, your cube can hold any number of primary colours. If your Cube holds a single primary colour, then it will be that colour. If your cube holds two different primary colours, then it will be a compound colour made of those. If your cube holds all three primary colours, then it will be white.

A big problem with the first version of the Colour Guide is that you can't always see how colours relate to each other at a glance. You also cannot see what the opposite colour of the one you currently are is (other than process of elimination).

Simply put, being magenta doesn't mean you are "magenta" per se, it means you are holding onto red and blue at the same time. So losing red would make you only hold onto that blue, and as a result become blue. This concept is what I needed to convey, hence why a Colour guide re-design was needed.

Back to basics

For the new colour guide design, I needed to show exactly what is going on internally when you hold onto colours, so I opted for a colour guide that shows all primary colours you can hold, and what colour you'd be if you hold any two colours.

So now when you become magenta, it clearly shows that you're holding blue + red.

And when you're white, it shows that you're holding all colours, rather than just a crazy effect.

This new colour guide is the default for the game now, but I still enjoyed the look of the previous design, and I didn't want it to all go to waste. So for those that really want it, there is a setting in the menus that can restore the Legacy Colour Guide!

In other news for the game, the second collection is well and truly underway, I'll be making another post soon about that and/or some other cool things!