Chasing The Right Blue For The Portholes

Every console panel on the station sits next to a porthole, and every porthole has its own faint wash of blue spilling in from outside. Getting that blue right — the actual color of a planet turning slowly against black — turned out to be far more fiddly than we expected when we first set the panels up.

Too saturated and it looks like a screensaver; too pale and it just looks grey. We went through a dozen versions before landing on something that reads as sky-blue without tipping into anything neon. It needed to sit quietly behind the amber console light, not compete with it.

The amber was easier, if we're honest. Console light has always been warm on this station, a kind of soft orange-gold that was never really up for debate. The challenge was making the blue and the amber sit together without either one washing the other out.

We tested it against actual footage of Earth from orbit more than once, holding panels up next to a paused frame like we were matching paint chips. It felt a bit absurd at the time, but the result is the porthole glow you see now, and we're glad we didn't rush it.

If a game looks a shade different to how you remember it, this is probably why. Same games, same points, just a slightly truer blue coming through the glass.