Building Color Rush: Lessons in Procedural Aesthetic Design
📅 June 15, 2026✍️ Sam Chen🏷️ Technical⏱️ 5 min read
Color Rush is one of our simplest games mechanically — matching colored shapes falls into the casual category — but it taught us more about game feel than any other project. The visual design is entirely procedural, and getting it right took five iterations.
The Color Palette Problem
Our first version used random HSL values for each shape. The result was visually chaotic and physically tiring to play. Colors that were technically distinct (like orange and yellow) looked the same in rapid succession. We settled on a curated palette of six colors with maximum perceptual distance: red, blue, green, yellow, purple, orange. Each color's RGB values are hard-coded to ensure they remain distinguishable even on cheap phone screens.
We also discovered that color placement matters. Red and green should never appear in consecutive shapes — the similarity in brightness causes visual confusion. Blue should always follow a warm color for maximum contrast.
Gradient and Anti-Aliasing
One specific technical challenge we solved: shapes moving from the center to the edge needed to remain the same apparent color regardless of position. On cheaper phone screens, color shifts slightly as shapes move to the edges because of viewing angle changes in the LCD panel. We tested four different color profiles before settling on one that maintained perceptual consistency across a 170-degree viewing angle.
The anti-aliasing for the shape boundaries was another problem. Sharp edges created shimmering artifacts during fast movement. We added 1px blur on the shape edges, which eliminated shimmering while maintaining the visual crispness. The performance cost of this blur was negligible because we cached the blurred shape mask to an offscreen canvas and only redrew position each frame.
The final iteration of the color palette was tested against four common types of color vision deficiency (protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia, and monochromacy). We adjusted the six colors to maintain maximum perceptual separation across all four conditions. The result is a game that is equally playable by the approximately 8% of male players with some form of color blindness. This was not an accessibility afterthought — it was a design requirement that shaped the palette from the beginning.