I really dislike most color pickers in games. You’re usually presented with a dizzying grid of color swatches, or some sliders that aren’t the most intuitive things to use, even for someone who spends a lot of time in graphics programs.

So I wanted to design something a little different for the character & costume creation in Tinselfly, something that lets you easily drill down to the color you want and go.

At first, you’ll be presented with a simple menu of things to choose from.

You can click on one of the primary colors, or one of the three shades of grey in the center.

If you click on a primary color, you’ll get some different variations of that color, so the color picker would look like one of the six variations below:

The new colors shown are further categorized by hue, and within each triangle of similarly-hued colors, you can pick a lightness and saturation that you like.

Similarly, if you click on one of the greys, you’ll get some variations that let you refine your color.

And that’s the basic idea.

I think this interface does a reasonable job of looking uncomplicated, even though there are still a couple hundred things to choose from. However, I don’t think it’s obvious how you’re supposed to interact with this thing. Some labels, bevels or general instructional text is probably needed.