Additions to the GUI

As the deadline is closing in we are mostly just finalizing things and adding the remaining missing assets to the game. All the features have been implemented as the most time consuming tasks have been completed. For the most part the UI needs to be worked on to comply with more recent design changes.

Since the player has 10 points of health the healthbar needed an additional asset to better represent the amount of health the player has. We could just use 10 skull lanterns/jars to display all 10 HP, but that cluttered the screen too much and it was difficult to read. To solve this we halved the amount and gave each of them an additional state. This made it easier for the player to read the overall amount. However, when testing this out we just made them red to represent the second state of the skulls lantern/jar, which wasn’t as readable as I wanted it to be. To better differenciate between the two states each skull lantern/jar was given a plain skull to show that it only represented a single point of health. It differenciates itself from the skull lanterns/jar by having a differing silhouette and a different set of colours. This will allow the player to focus more on what is happening in the play field and less on the HUD.

During play, the player will be able to collect souls and gain more power by putting them in their “parade”. To display the progress the player makes we use the parade bar, but since the upgrades doesn’t come with every soul the player collects we had to make additions to the parade bar to better communicate this. The function of the parade bar has been difficult to communicate to the player. They usually recognize that the skull lanterns/jars represent health, but the parade bar wasn’t always understood and its function was unclear to them. This is something that I wanted to solve with these additions by making it more clear that it is tied to something.

Each flag represents each soul, and each green flag with a plus sign under it represents the collected soul that led to the upgrade of the players attack. Gaining power is a positive effect for the player, so I went for plus signs  and a greener colour to make the player connect a positive effect with a common sign for something positive that is green plus signs. They also have a different silhouette/shape which should help make the player see that with these flags something different has happened.

Because the production pipeline was figured out, neither of these assets were a challenge to produce, but they were a bit more difficult to design in such a way that the player understands what they stand for.

About André Tingvall

2016 Graphics

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