Have you thought about making your bars bigger and putting the numbers inside the bar? I like that as it puts all that health information in one place.
HP displays on enemies or visual indicators?
That's a solid suggestion. We did something similar to that in the past (the numbers sat in the middle of the bar and were drawn over the top half of it). We recently changed to this scheme because we added a new feature to our battle system which included some additional information to the bars (the darker section you see in the above screenshot), and this information was obscured by having the numbers drawn over the bars. So in this case doing that wouldn't work well for us, but should work well for most other games.
I'd say for a platformer or action game, you probably don't need any health indicators for the enemies (except bosses). It should probably only take a few hits to beat them, so the player can keep track of that without any extra clutter. It's just important that you can tell when the enemy took damage.
For bosses with more health, I prefer a health bar, unless there are RPG elements that allow the player to increase their damage. If a player is adjusting their stats to do more damage, it's good to see those numbers in action. But if the game doesn't have that kind of RPG element, adding numbers to their attacks just seems like extra stuff the player doesn't need to think about.
If a player is adjusting their stats to do more damage, it's good to see those numbers in action.
Alternatively, make sure any changes to stats make very meaningful changes to damage, then any changes can be reflected more easily through just a health bar.
I like a visual indicator of health, and as Servant of the Lord said feedback in regards to how much damage I'm doing.
I always think that a health bar is the most intuitive thing. It's great to see how much damage you're doing as well. Visual feedback on the state of your enemy's health is good fluff but less important for actual game play I think.
I always think that a health bar is the most intuitive thing. It's great to see how much damage you're doing as well. Visual feedback on the state of your enemy's health is good fluff but less important for actual game play I think.
The general appearance and theme of the health bar is important. For example in diabolo 2 the health meters were potion bottles that emptied as you took damage. Eventually I want to do the same in my game with the "skin" of the fluid bubbling and moving gently. The more damage you take the more it will bubble violently giving the impression that your very life force is boiling away.
Also remember the kids tv show Knightmare? The health bar was originally an adventurers face fully helmeted. As time progressed the helmet corroded and fell away revealing flesh, and then the flesh fell away revealing muscle and bone. Eventually the pieces of skull tumbled away into the void and when all were gone the player was dead.
It's all in the presentation.
Although it was obviously a timer made to appear as health points the way it appeared on screen was everything...
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A lot of interesting suggestions, especially putting numbers inside an hp bar, which brings back memories of Warcraft 2. I do agree that there is an excitement to not knowing how much hp the enemy has left, as long as you know they are being damaged.
I never played D2, but I played the original, really digged the glass sphere holding red liquid for life and blue liquid for mana.
The I'm working on is mainly intended for smartphones, and since the action is already pushing the limits of my android's phone, back when I use to run visual indicators of hp in the form of numbers, it created significant lag. Thus the possible move to a visual indicator via the sprite changing in some way the lower hp is. Right now, the enemy just flashes on hit. {The white box and colored numbers that appear are related to a test involving the enemy x,y. when I was trying to implement a particular feature}
The footage is from the desktop version, which is why it runs smoothly. My goal right now is to just have something universal in regards to health/damage display, that can run on smartphone as well. I have yet to implement the smoke method I was planning as I had been working on reducing load times since my last post.
In League of Legends, the HP-bar is cut into pieces of 100HP each, as a character levels up more pieces are cramped together,
additionally, when taking damage, the amount of HP lost turns red before disappearing(i believe most fighting games do this as well)
(damage numbers can be turned on/off through the options-menu)
At this moment in my game (JRPG with turn based battles) I have a health bar for friendly characters, but not for enemy characters.
I do however have a number display for how much damage is done from both sides for each action.
The reasoning behind this is to strike a balance between information and tension- the player knows which actions are effective and can therefore make informed strategic choices, but does not know how close they are to winning an encounter, and must gamble on if they should stay longer and fight or flee as their own health drops lower and lower.
I hope this dynamic pays off. It is also a personal artistic choice to have as few numbers and indicators as practically possible so the focus is on immersion rather than math and number crunching. For example I always disliked in the Pokemon games how you could see the enemies' health bar and their level, which always made me feel more like I was "playing a game" instead of supporting my immersion by hiding elements I realistically shouldn't know.
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