Our project is a shoot ‘em up game. The theme of game revolves around a world of stone “trees” that have a structure of a geode; stone on the outside and a crystal hollow core. All of the creatures of the world live inside of these “trees”. And the energy of the world is in the crystals. In this game the avatar Betulla, a mix of a spider and a humanoid, climbs the inside of the tree trunk in search of places that are concentrations of energy.
The sketch you see on the screen is my attempt to show my team how a health bar in our game can look like. Disregarding the awful visuals of it, as I am not an artist, there is actually a lot of thought put into this. Let’s go thought different elements and my thinking:
-The positioning: The edges of our screen (as seen in the drawing) are filled with the edge of the tree trunk. So, if we place the player’s feedback outside of the tree it will shrink our playing space even more. It makes more sense to place health bar at the bottom, especially since the avatar can’t walk back down the tree in our design.
-Player feedback: In our game, we decided to make the health of the avatar the ammunition. This let us to the concept of “energy is everything”. You consist of this energy, you use this energy as the weapon. This would require a very dynamic meter that can fast reflect the change in the resource. This type of bar is easy to use as both a health meter and ammo meter. However, there is still space to place a numeric value for people who prefer a solid information instead of abstract symbolism.
-Aesthetics: I can poorly capture the aesthetical possibilities of this sketch, but I can try to explain what I wanted to show. To me, it is important for the health bar to be associated with our avatar. I tried to do that through turning the left side of the bar into a resemblance of a spider leg. This is the lowest life point, it is narrow, this makes me feel the accent of how little health you have. The right side in my drawing has a “cap” that can make connection to the avatar even stronger, like an object belonging to the avatar or the shape of her hairdo. I also want our health bar to reflect the contrast between the crystal containing life energy and the crystal that is empty.
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