Enemy Health Bars | Patreon Weekly #163

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, Patreon Poll #31 is running! Go have your say about what side content I work on in v1.4.0!

Sorry for the slight delay on this weekly, I was quite busy over the weekend attending Anime North! This was my first large convention, so the combination of the heat, excitement, and cautiousness over covid has left me a little drained. It’s been two days since the con now so I’m almost totally in the clear in terms of sickness, but it’ll be nice to hopefully not have to worry about it as much next year.

In this weekly I’m going to cover my continued progress on those interface adjustments planned for v1.3.2. If all goes well I hope to have 1.3.2 released in another couple of days.

Enemy Health Bars

In the last weekly I talked about progress on additional enemy info on the top-left. Unfortunately, since that post I’ve decided to scrap the feature.

I’m sorry about this, as I know better enemy info was a popular choice in a previous poll, but the UI just ended up being too cumbersome. The incarnation you saw in the previous weekly was suitably compact but didn’t convey enough information to be very useful. Crucially, when there were crowds of enemies (the exact situation this UI was supposed to help with) it was impossible to tell which enemy was which at the top-left.

The most elegant way to fix that would be to highlight enemy infos when you moused over the corresponding enemy on screen, but at that point why not just have all the info show on-highlight and cut out the top-left clutter entirely? While I don’t have time to fully implement this for v1.3.2, that’s the direction I’m going to head in: having extra detail show up on mouse-hover, instead of in the top-left corner.

However, as a precursor to this I am going to expand boss health bars in v1.3.2! This should be helpful to both desktop and mobile users. You can see the old UI on the left and the new one on the right. I expect hover enemy health bars will be similar, although probably a bit less wide:

Changes Screen Improvements

I’ve also made progress on changes screen improvements, here’s a WIP of the new interface at 720p:

There are still some kinks to iron out, especially at smaller display resolutions, but this should hopefully make the interface a bit more intuitive to desktop users and lay some groundwork for future interface expansions. Many game interfaces follow the basic pattern of ‘display a list/grid of elements that open a window when selected’, and they can all be expanded in similar ways.