I’m now going to do something really dangerous.
I’m going to try to add a color scheme.
Why is this dangerous? Because I’m partially colorblind, so I normally run all my color schemes past at least two people with normal color vision to make sure they work. But for this competition, I can’t do that!
Still, I feel like it’ll be enough of an improvement over the default black and white to be worth the risk. We’ll see if it pays off. For a Z-machine game, I have an interpreter customized to exactly the typography I want. For an Å-machine game, it’s entirely in the author’s hands—so I want to put some effort into that!
For dark mode, my favorite:
The main color palette is entirely monochromatic, since I want to give the whole thing a retro vibe. So the dark blue and light blue have the same hue and saturation, just different lightness. I like how that turned out. And cool colors feel more science-fiction to me than warm ones.
The links, though, need to stand out more. I think a nice green feels retro and sci-fi, standing out enough without being jarring. The whole thing holds together well.
Light mode…I struggled.
For these links, I tried so many different shades of green, yellow, orange, and red, trying to find something that would stand out against both the text and the background. But that’s one of the things I have the most trouble with: distinguishing between very dark colors on a light backdrop. So I have no real way of knowing what’s too much or too little for the average player!
Eventually I found a magenta that worked okay. It looks a little incongruous against the blue background, but hopefully it works for people.
Still, I’m going to rig things in my favor a little. Å-machine games by default always start in light mode. I’ve adjusted the web interpreter (in the past) so that it picks light or dark mode depending on the browser settings. This time, I’m going to make it always start in dark mode, which I think looks the best. People who prefer light mode can still switch to it in the options menu, but now, people who have no preference will end up with the one that looks better.