Hi,

I'm currently working on a game in which there is a combat playback simulation sequence (all is automated).

In an effort to keep the player informed of what is happening, I've recently added 'gauges' to keep track of each ship's life and the status of their weapon.

I use the below color-coding:

Green: Friendly ships' life (also determines they are YOUR ships).

Red: Enemy ships' life (also determines they are your OPPONENT's ships).

Blue: Readiness status of each weapon (cooldown/reload).

There's currently a lot of gauges on screen and I was wondering if anyone had suggestion on how to better organize all of this information.

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Quick edit based on these comments:

I've taken 1 and 3 together by placing the readiness bars below the life (thus using the space efficiently).

As for ship colors, from an indie budget's standpoint, having each ship use color swaps would be a nightmare... Perhaps I could work using an icon on the side instead though?

Thanks.

I must confess though that, looking at this representation so often lately, I'm affraid my judgment has become warped, hence why I felt I needed a bit of external feedback on this.

I have a fairly good control over the height of each bar, so I can definitely stretch the life bar to make it bigger in comparison to the other bars.

That's still a heavy UI component to have (especially on a ship with, say, 6-10 weapons!). Perhaps I should come up with the worst-case scenario upfront and see whether this approach is viable.

Thanks again.

In addition to the improvements you've made, I'd make the life bar slightly higher and add markers for 25%, 50% and 75% (this will also allow you to reduce the width of the bars without them becoming hard to read). Also, I'd get rid of weapon charge bars for charge times < 1 or 2 seconds.

Looks awesome so far, keep up the great work!