Jason's Thoughts 5 - Major UI Feedback

We just had our first major testing session and it seems the UI is simply not drawing enough attention. Initially we briefly discussed a number of ways to improve this, for example audio cues, and visual cues above the player and the HUD when certain things are happening. After highlighting these things we also decided to explore other HUD options, remembering that this HUD was birthed basically from a mock up and hadn’t really undergone enough thought. The clearest thing out of the testing was simply that our HUD was far too cluttered, so we decided to divert our design as much as possible from our old HUD and make a "bare bones" HUD from the ground up. This meant including only information for HP, defence level, and crates. We dropped the attack bar because the game now used an “EXP. System” and representing attack level no longer had a purpose because it would now increase slightly in level automatically whenever a player shot something. We did away with the changing backgrounds as we felt the layers may have created a visual distinction problem and decided to try representing HP as a percentage. This means that HP would be clearer, which was one of the main issues of concern, and this also matched what we had seen in other party style games. We dropped all the button cues, hoping our tutorial and in game feedback would fill that role and therefore our HUD could be even simpler. The percentage worked by measuring a damage stat when damage was dealt, and simply reduced that number and the player’s percent by 1 per frame until damage reached the desired value. There were some bugs with this but it gave the desired visual effect of losing HP not in chunks, but in a fast reduction, and since it was simply a test HUD we deemed this acceptable at present. We also decided to use a visual representation of defence rather than a bar. We did this by using an image of and empty shield which gets filled in quarter-sized chunks as the player increases defence, we thought this would be more intuitive for players.

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