Potato Pirates of The Prohibition – New Hud
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Hello dear readers, this week I have been working on finishing the loading system in the game, I have also been working on a new experimental HUD that I will be focusing on in this week’s blog post. New HUDBefore going into detail on how it works and looks I thought I would give some backstory, in the beta playtest and earlier we had a more “static” HUD, it was kind of basic but did what we wanted, you could see your life, your ammunition and your power-ups. However after the beta playtest we did get some feedback that it was quite hard to read it because our game had so much action going on. In the game there was a lot of flying potato bullets all over the screen and you often had to look at your character to make sure you could dodge them. Because of this it made it really hard to read the HUD because it was located in the top left corner, and the player often didn’t have their eyes focused on it. After we had decided to change the HUD design we were talking about having it more centered at the bottom of the screen, I however though it looked a bit “boring” and it also required the player to look away from the player’s avatar to look at the bottom part of the screen. I then tried to design a new HUD that was centered on the player’s avatar, where the player would have most of his focus in the game. I wanted to keep it quite simple so it wouldn’t be too distracting while playing, but also be there when the player wanted to see how much ammo he had left. In the picture below you can see a zoomed in version on the player, the red and orange circle is the only HUD elements you will really see
As seen in the picture above you only have 3 elements close to the player avatar, 1 a red health bar which indicates your life. 2, an orange bar which indicates your ammo, this also includes an ammo text to make sure you know exactly how much ammo you have left. Some things are still missing from the HUD however, for example when you pick up a power-up you will have a circle that appears telling you what power-up you have equipped, however its currently not yet finished, but is something that will be finished in the next days to come before the beta. Another thing the HUD includes is your score which will be shown at the middle top part of your screen, to make sure you easily can check it without it being too much in your way.
(click here for bigger version) Above you can see a simple old versus new HUD to see how the difference is between the old and the new one. Anyway, that’s all for me today, I will continue doing some small changes on the HUD, however most of it will stay as it is now. Other than that it is mostly getting the rest of the game ready for the beta that is coming this next Monday! Thanks for reading and be sure to leave a comment!  |
