Colour options / settings / preferences

[wfaulk]

I'd like to see options to customize colors. Light yellow on light gray can be really hard to see on the line-based games.

[chrisboyle]

A user wrote in 2013 (#73):

"Hi Chris. I'm playing Keen and have run into a problem. I'm color blind. Do you think you could change the colors to not be green and red so that I can see when I've made a mistake?"

[chrisboyle]

Related feature request from Felipe Lessa: "night mode with a black background".

Certainly possible, but each backend would need careful tweaking: currently they accept an arbitrary background colour but will typically give up and adjust the background if it doesn't contrast with both white and black.

[meteficha]

An inverse color mode would be good enough for my main use case, which is playing on the dark. Of course, a nice custom dark palette would be even better, but I have no idea how much development cost that entails :).

[chrisboyle]

Another colour blind user points out the inaccessibility of Map. There's actually an alternate colour set selectable at compile time but it doesn't look like it'd help; it's red, green, yelow, blue.

A letter mode was also suggested; filed as #221.

And a useful reminder: "If you decide to make changing the palette an option, keep in mind that different individuals have difficulty with different ranges of colour. For example, with the red/green/yellow/blue palette suggested on github, I would have trouble with the red/green distinction, but others would have trouble with the blue/yellow. Either having multiple palette options, or having each colour in the palette individually selectable, would probably be the easiest way to make the puzzle as accessible as possible without using the letter labels."

[chrisboyle]

Another request for night mode:

"I really like solving one of your puzzles right before falling asleep. But, very often the screen just feels too bright for this to be healthy. Might it be possible to include a night mode in which most of the screen is black?"

[chrisboyle]

I changed the Map colours in 160012b (improving colour blind accessibility and night mode compatibility) and have two unhappy users so far. David B. Hecht writes:

I am disappointed that the colors in Map are now bright primaries instead of the previous earth tones, and I can't seem to change them in settings. The red seriously bothers me for some reason.

and Linda George asks in a Play review to

change the colours back to "camo" in the maps puzzle, or even better, let us choose our own

Edit: Avonlea Gardner and falcathief requested original colours by email as well.

[fropeter]

It would be an exaggeration to call me an unhappy user, but I do have a problem with this game:
When marking possible colors for an area, i.e. using dots, some of the colors are hard to distinguish (blue/green) and yellow is hard to see on a white background. If there was a setting to choose between original and current colorscheme, (apart from my liking the originals better,) I think it would solve this particular problem.

[omgitsraven]

I would also enjoy the ability to customize all colours (i.e. even black + white) just for aesthetic reasons, if possible. Colourblind accessibility is the most important reason to make this change, but once it's in, hopefully it would be doable to not just stop at hard-coding alternate sets for the colourblind-problematic games, but having a section of the preferences to tweak all of it at will?

[chrisboyle]

Just to explicitly note it here: Simon has mentioned a plan to add colour preferences upstream, so I will wait for that to happen before adding anything on Android.

[NA0341]

Thank you for pointing that out :)
Most Applications I use have one Setting for Dark Mode¹ and one for the Theme Variant² which works pretty well.

¹ i.e. light, dark, system
² for dark this could be teal, dark, black and default, bright, sakura, etc for bright

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Since this is more than one simple application, offering users the ability to create their own color palette may be a good idea.

Suggestion
You could add a button in settings: create custom theme which would create a text file containing all color values from current color scheme (which is saved using the systems save dialog).
The user can then edit the file externally and apply it with apply custom theme.

This would also allow sharing themes easily

[slacksystem]

I agree about customizable colors being the best solution. Being able to set each of the puzzle related colors and background is surely the most complete possible solution in terms of both accessibility and user preference, and should leave no room for anyone to complain about it if implemented. @chrisboyle do you know whether or not that's what Simon plans to add or if he might be thinking more like a couple hard-coded options? Not sure how much he divulged of his plan