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Mainly, the concept of subtractive mixing. Paint (or pigment) works by absorbing a portion of the visible spectrum and reflecting the rest. What you see is wha

Mainly, the concept of subtractive mixing. Paint (or pigment) works by absorbing a portion of the visible spectrum and reflecting the rest. What you see is what is reflected. When you mix pigments, both portions of the spectrum are absorbed, and a smaller resultant portion is reflected. We mostly think of color in terms of light, and mixing colors of light which is often the opposite (light: "all colors mixed is white" as opposed to paint: "all paints mixed is black"). Our game uses paint as the underlying physics concept rather than light. Adding cyan to magenta gives blue when you're talking about pigments. Even in the case a player understood the theory of light and pigments, when playing a game you need to reflexively tap your intuition to understand what happens when a change is affected: "When I add/remove X color to Y what do I get?" Additionally, players weren't used to CMY as the primaries and always thought in terms of RGB. Because our game is a real-time (racing-based) puzzle game, we had to do many iterations on our game UI to help players answer this question much faster while also navigating the level. From our game design standpoint, this was the major intuition gap we encountered.

invincing 9y ago
I think the intuition gap comes from the misleading arts education about colour. It's still common to teach in schools that primary colors for paint are blue, red and yellow - when the correct primary colors are cyan, magenta and yellow as everybody familiar with CMYK printing can tell. If you search the internet about mixing paints, almost every site claims that the primary colours are blue, red and yellow... So I don't think it's the subtractive mixing itself, but subtractive mixing with CMY colors (and not the wrong model of red, blue and yellow they are used to). There's long history of arts education with this misconception, partly because suitable pigments for CMY colour model are relatively new invention. Blue, red and yellow also kind of work well enough, especially if you tweak the palette by having two shades of each as your "primary colors". (E.g. you can mix saturated green from cadmium yellow and prussian blue, but if you mix chrome yellow and ultramarine blue, the green will be muddy). It's kind of like instead of having a full triangular gamut of CMY space, you crop the corners off of the triangle and have a a sort of hexagonal gamut. As primary colors are by definition "colors that can't be mixed from other colors", it's strange that in arts education they still claim that red and blue are primary colors, when it's obvious that red can be mixed from magenta and yellow, and blue can be mixed from cyan and magenta, as every colour printer is doing it like this.

invincing 9y ago

I think the intuition gap comes from the misleading arts education about colour. It's still common to teach in schools that primary colors for paint are blue, red and yellow - when the correct primary colors are cyan, magenta and yellow as everybody familiar with CMYK printing can tell. If you search the internet about mixing paints, almost every site claims that the primary colours are blue, red and yellow... So I don't think it's the subtractive mixing itself, but subtractive mixing with CMY colors (and not the wrong model of red, blue and yellow they are used to). There's long history of arts education with this misconception, partly because suitable pigments for CMY colour model are relatively new invention. Blue, red and yellow also kind of work well enough, especially if you tweak the palette by having two shades of each as your "primary colors". (E.g. you can mix saturated green from cadmium yellow and prussian blue, but if you mix chrome yellow and ultramarine blue, the green will be muddy). It's kind of like instead of having a full triangular gamut of CMY space, you crop the corners off of the triangle and have a a sort of hexagonal gamut. As primary colors are by definition "colors that can't be mixed from other colors", it's strange that in arts education they still claim that red and blue are primary colors, when it's obvious that red can be mixed from magenta and yellow, and blue can be mixed from cyan and magenta, as every colour printer is doing it like this.