Today the level designers held a meeting with us, the writers, to explain, discuss and finalise their ideas for the heads-up display (HUD), asking if we would like to help. After accepting the level designer’s offer, the writers and I helped them design the game/demo’s HUD.
We decided to keep the HUD simple and intuitive, keeping the layout similar to other games of our genre as to not overload the player – making the HUD look too complicated or unnatural may put off new players. We also discussed how the HUD feeds into the mechanics of our game and how it is the visual representation of them, meaning that if we mis-communicate anything on the HUD, the player might result to leaving our game/demo through anger or confusion. To prevent this from happening, we confirmed that the layout needs to be clear and clutter free – only displaying what is needed, when its needed.
Mini-Map: We discussed that the mini-map would be vital for exploring our game/demo and would therefore need to be clear and easy to access, therefore it will be in the bottom right hand corner of the screen by itself – consequently, being easy to glance at and not too imposing on the screen. Due to it’s importance, the mini-map will stay on the screen throughout gameplay.
Objective Box: Simply, this box would be invisible until a quest is collected. Once a quest has been activated, a line of text will display what the player must do and will remain in the top right corner until the quest is completed, allowing for the player to then take another quest.
Experience Bar: Remaining at the middle bottom of the screen for the entirety of the game/demo, the experience bar will act as the influence gauge - the length of our planned demo is too short to include and influence bar as influence is meant to be collected throughout the game, not just the beginning stages, therefore resulting in its replacement. When the player completes any interaction that would boost his influence within the dome (hacking robots or completing quests) the bar will fill up with a fixed amount of experience/influence. To indicate this more thoroughly to the player, text will appear below the objective box, play a sound cue and flash slowly for a few seconds before disappearing, therefore drawing attention from the player to inform them.
Dialogue System: Only appearing when certain interactions are made (Talking to an NPC or interacting with an item), a text box will appear above the experience bar showing the player what the current character is saying Along with this, the current character will have one of 6 sprites displayed to the left of the text box: shocked, angry, bashful, happy, sad and neutral - to clearly display the emotions of the character and to show how a character was meant to say something, with different cultures taking different outcomes from the same text, therefore eliminating confusion. When a character isn’t speaking, the sprite displayed will be one of Lucas’ due to him being the player character – and reinforcing some of his personality traits by lingering around.
Time: Due to the time restraints and restrictions for our demo, we decided to implement the player’s current time (using their computer time) in the top left corner of the screen. Originally, if we were making a full game, we planned to include several time related features (quests, etc. ) and implement our games own calendar, however, we decided to compromise and show the real world time instead. The bonus to this is that the player can then track how much time they have been playing the game and would discourage them from playing for an unhealthy amount of time. With this in mind, the clock will be constant throughout the game. Due to skill requirements and lack of research, the visuals shown are uncertain and will be an option of either an analogue clock or written digital time.
Currency: Being an important aspect of our game, the players current currency will be displayed below the time and will change in accordance to the players current financial state.
Overall, I feel that today was successful as it aided to the development of our game/demo and was a great source of planning to prevent future mistakes. By planning the HUD out in this detail and by having these discussions now, it makes all of the teams involved clearer on the project at hand – therefore the final result will be better and more accurate as a result. In the future, I will organise a meeting with the level designers to see how the HUD’s development is coming along as well as to check what/if any work is needed by the writers, objectives for example.
Comments