The Science Behind Color in Video Game Design
In the past, we’ve written about how colors play a role in game design. They’re great for focusing the player and conveying emotions, but a lot more goes into bringing those colors to life on your screen.
Screen technology has changed a lot over the past decades and with it, so has the way we capture colors. Let’s take a look at how, not why, colors are created in video games.
The Additive Color Model
Today, we create color using the additive color model, but many players know it as RGB. The model works by using red, green, and blue colors in each pixel, and then adding or reducing light to change their hue. That, and the mixing of the three primary colors, make it possible to create any color of the rainbow.
You see this model in action everywhere, especially in colorful digital experiences that balance contrasting colors and light levels. Slot games are a widespread example of this – they have a lot of settings that demand bold colors. The popular Sweet Bonanza slot does this well, thanks to its bright pink candy floss background. It’s rendered using the red-colored pixels, treated with light to turn them into a pastel pink. Then, for the actual fruit symbols, the brightness isn’t turned up so high, keeping the symbols darker and richly colored. It’s a fine demonstration of how the additive color model forms the backbone of modern color in video games, and everything else we view through a screen.
Storing & Deploying Color Assets
While the color additive model explains how we use colors at the screen level, game designers need to consider other factors like computational load. Fortunately, thanks to the additive color system, the existence of color in games doesn’t increase a game’s file size. The primary colors are already there, ready to be used by virtually every application on your device.
That said, storage size is at the mercy of texture complexity and resolution, which has been the main focus of gaming development over the past decade or two. That’s why modern games can get so big, as explained by PC Gamer. With more texture detail, you’ll typically see more color shades heaped on top of one another to create realistic imagery. These complex colors are mapped onto 2K or 4K texture maps, but the colors themselves don’t inflate file size.
Deploying color assets is a similar story. First, your monitor hardware dictates how fast your pixels can react to new color input. Then your GPU is responsible for calculating things like light, reflections, and shadows, which affect the color experience you’re seeing on-screen. Processing the colors isn’t technically demanding, but passing those colors through a reflective puddle in a dimly lit room requires more processing power. Once again, it’s the staging of the color that has more computational impact than the colors themselves.
Ensuring Consistency in Color
With so many developers making so many games, not to mention other software, you’d think it’d be tricky delivering the exact same color experience. We overcame that problem in 1996 by using standardized color spaces like sRGB (standard RGB). Hardware providers rigorously test using sRGB as a baseline, to make sure everybody is seeing the same colors.
Game developers choose a color space to work with. Of course, games tend to occupy only a part of this color space. Early in development, artists and developers will collaborate to create a color palette. This is also where they consider the setting, color psychology, and if the textures demand complex colors. To better understand color palettes, you can follow Design Lab’s steps to do it yourself.
Modern game engines also use color grading, using LUTs (Look-Up Tables) and volumes to establish or change a color scene. Walking from an interior to an exterior, for example, could swap a darker, sheltered LUT with a warmer, sunny LUT now you’re outside. They work like filters, but those LUT files also serve as reference points to keep colors consistent within the game itself.
Color is everywhere, so every digital creator has to work with it. While every game developer uses the same RGB pixels, they need to refine players’ color experience by designing textures and using post-processing filters.
