I'm not going to pretend what I came up with can match any of that. Truth be told, there are hundreds of thousands of things I feel genuinely positive about, anyway. There's the theoretically easy route to market, the range of platforms for developers to aim for, the endless possibilities of cheap middleware and - oh yeah! - the sheer amount of good games that are coming out. Something else - something far more basic - popped into my head, though, and then it wouldn't go away. Over the last few years, games have rediscovered colour.

Okay, a caveat here: I appreciate that the much-maligned colourlessness of contemporary games has been fiercely overstated in the first place. Platformers and puzzlers, for example, never fell out of love with Richard of York, and even the blandest of military shooters will have a good chunk of the rainbow present - in the skies, in the trees, in the rich glow of your burning and irradiated comrades. Drink it in! The idea that games have become monochrome this generation holds up to no scrutiny.

What I do think is true, though, is that games often play back in the mind a little blandly now, due to their artfully limited pallets. When I think of Space Marine, in other words, I tend to remember uninterrupted passages of rusty browns, while a lot of other shooters seem to be parades of sandy beige and urban grey. When I say games have rediscovered colour, I guess I mean that more and more games are falling in love with bold, dynamic ranges of colour: they're throwing in all kinds of different shades at once, and it makes a real difference.

taking equidistant colors in the HSV color space is no solution for finding a set of colors that are perceived as equidistant. This post describes what's wrong with HSV and what we can do about this.

“What is the color of the Universe? This seemingly simple question has never  been answered by astronomers until now.”

A color picking utility.

dip-dye gradient tights