Health Bar Shielding | Patreon Poll #69

Hey Patrons, with all the UI changes happening recently, there’s one I thought would be interesting to let you guys decide on.

Currently the way Shattered’s health bars visually handle shielding isn’t consistent with how a lot of other games seem to handle it, so I’m curious if that’s something you’d like to see changed!

Poll Options

Please vote for all the options that you like, not just for your one favourite! I allow multiple votes as it means that a higher proportion of people will end up voting for the winning choice. Note however that multiple choice polls have been finicky on Patreon for a while, so you may need to refresh the page/app to verify your choices or vote for multiple options.

All patrons are encouraged to share their opinion by commenting and voting, but only the votes from Golden+ Supporters are counted when determining a poll winner. Votes from Shattered Supporters are worth double!

Right overlapping is the first choice, and is how the HP bar currently looks:

(Note that I’m using the desktop player HP bar here to demonstrate, but changes would affect all HP bars in the same way). The intent here was to make it look like some shield was ‘protecting’ the last bit of the player’s HP. This made more sense back when the only shield buff was the Warrior’s tiny passive shield though, and now it doesn’t make as much sense to me.

Left overlapping is the first immediate alternative, with shielding still overlapping HP but coming from the left:

The most immediate place I recall that I’ve seen this style is in Risk of Rain 2, where ‘barrier’, a sort of very short term shield, is layered over the HP bar from the left. This is a bit more logical in its layout than the current way (being laid out from left to right) but still preserves the overlapping look.

Right Additional is another style that’s quite common in other games that involve multiple health types. Shielding is still on the right but stacks on top of the HP amount instead of covering it:

Probably the most prominent game I can think of that uses this style is League of Legends. It more clearly shows the total amount of effective health, with shield showing ‘on top’ of health. However, it does mean that shielding will start to crowd out HP a bit if the total amount is higher than the player’s max health.