January 16, 2017

Blue Asterisk Instead Of Red Cross

I noticed this article on Kotaku about the developers of Prison Architect running into trouble when they used the Red Cross to denote health.  We encountered something similar back when we were developing SiN Episodes: Emergence.

If you play SiN Ep, you may notice that all of the health containers have a blue asterisk and have the initialism F.T.R.C. emblazoned on them (standing for the Freeport Trauma Recovery Center).

What you may not know was that this was a response to me forwarding an article from GameIndustry.biz to management (link to summary), and the artists deciding to put in a response that a) lined up with the color of the healing spray, b) was not in any way able to be mistaken for a red cross or red crescent, and c) was a subtle way of putting in an initialism for "Fuck The Red Cross."