Accessibility settings are great, but you know whats one step better? When accessibility is always on, baked into the design of a game from the start. Nobody wants to have to stop the tutorial during the first step to go frantically searching for accessibility features. Since the flowers are the most important elements of the Primrows game board, our goal from the beginning was to come up with a set of flowers whose colors and shapes would remain distinct for as wide a range of vision accessibility needs as possible. But Ive already gotten ahead of myself here, because the choice to use flowers was in itself an accessibility choice. Heres a re-creation of the very first prototype for the game that would evolve into Primrows 2010, which leaned heavily on the games Sudoku roots:
A perfectly utilitarian option, but beyond just lacking character, it demands a certain level of literacy. And even though you arent doing any actual calculations with these numbers in Primrows (or in Sudoku, for that matter), a lot of people with discalculia or a general aversion to math find this style to be its own barrier to entry. Abandoning this design turned out to be the right call for several reasons. (And for those people who do find numbers to be the best way to distinguish the different flowers, we incorporated the numbers one through five in the design of the flowers. Can you spot them?) Since we knew relying on color alone to distinguish flowers wasnt going to be an option, Susan made sure all the shapes of the flower had as much shape contrast as possible -- some tall, some wide, some round, some pointy. Among other things, the suits of a deck of playing cards served as a bit of inspiration.
During this phase, Cathy spent a good amount of time looking at her monitor with her glasses off at various distances and once we had a final design, we made sure to seek out playtesters with low vision to check our work.
Choosing the colors took a lot of effort, and we spent a lot of time looking at different color options in color blindness simulators to try and find a set of colors that had contrast across a wide range of color vision deficiencies, while still maintaining stylistic consistency. On the left is an early color palette, and on the right is the revised version that made it into the final version.
Of course, simulators are no substitute for testing accessibility with real humans, so we made efforts to recruit playtesters with various types of colorblindness. These tests are what revealed to us that, while players were able to distinguish the different types of flower from each other, there were some issues distinguishing the flowers from the game board, and we needed at least a little bit of a shadow behind the flowers to help players out.
In addition to what weve done with the flowers, weve also been using tools to ensure our UI elements meet minimum contrast requirements -- and I havent even touched on the things we took into consideration for motor accessibility, or the way every sound in the game has a companion animation cue. We do hope our efforts have contributed to a game that most people will be able to enjoy!

Join Cathy, Susan, and Kitt, three of the people behind Primrows, for our special developer stream for Steam Next Fest! We'll be introducing you to the world of Primrows, showing you how to play, and answering some of the questions collected from our social media followers and Discord server.

Primrows isnt a match-three. In fact, some of our playtesters described it as the opposite of a match-three. But lets be honest with ourselves: to someone window-shopping through the Steam Store, the game looks like it might be a match-three at a glance. Colorful shapes on a grid? Seems to fit the pattern, right? Because of this surface-level similarity, we wanted to make sure that this game would appeal to the kind of audience that loves that sort of game. To explain how we approached this challenge, let me first introduce the stars of Primrows: the flowers!
Sometimes theyre happy, sometimes theyre sleepy, sometimes theyre a little bit startled. These emotions arent just there to liven up the mood, they convey important hints to the player! When you first plant a garden, every flower will either be happy or sleepy. Happy flowers score, sleepy flowers dont.
The emotion in between the two the perked up state provides key feedback during the next step. Once youve grown your garden, you get two chances to prune your garden to grow more happy flowers. Even though the rules are simple to explain flowers are happy when they are one-of-a-kind in their row, column, and quadrant they take time for new players to really get used to.
Without the surprised emotion, this is what the board would look like after a bit of pruning. Its harder to tell whether or not your decisions were good until theyre already locked in, and its too late to make any changes. Whats more, since flowers are chosen at random whenever they grow, you arent necessarily guaranteed a reward just because you made a smart move. In this state, Primrows would play with the pacing of a board game. This would be fine for a board game, but the sort of players drawn to games made up of a grid of colorful shapes typically come to the table expecting more immediate feedback. To provide this feedback, we introduced the middle-ground perked up expression. These are the flowers that might be happy the next time you grow flowers, depending on the roll of the dice. It highlights exactly what youre risking, and what you stand to gain.
With the perked up state, now you know at a glance that the purple flower in the left is safe, all three of the blue flowers have woken up and might score once new flowers grow in the empty spaces, and none of the light cyan flowers have any potential to score. Also, the happy yellow and pink flowers are at risk. Importantly, you get all of this feedback before youve locked in your decisions by watering the garden again to make new flowers grow. If you want to take a less risky or more aggressive strategy, youve got time to prune and unprune.

The original Primrows came out almost fifteen years ago, and in that time weve grown as a studio and our standards have grown along with us. We chose to do a full remake of the game from the ground up to deliver a game that could show off how much weve grown in that time. Lets take a quick tour of how things have changed since 2010!

Flowers

Backgrounds

Holidays