I'm designing an RPG and have a few ruff images of the battle GUI done. I would like to get everyones feedback on what you think of it. Feedback as in confusing to use, boring, good, bad, easy to navigate, etc. Now remember that this was made in paint "the images" and these are just a ruff image of how it should be laid out so some imagination will be needed. Thanks for your input in advance. Wow these are big images!



Below is a light description of the battle system to help anyone understand a little more about it.
Battle GUI Descriptions:Summon Mana Bar - The summon mana bar will have the summon spirit name above it and to the right of the name it will display the mana points that the summon spirit has left. For example 64/102 this means the summon has 64 mana points left out of 102 mana points. The bar will be a blue color to represent mana and will the bar will decrease as mana is used in conjunction to the text mana points that are to the right of the summon name. Character display box: The character display box will have a picture representing the character in the top left of the box. Beside that will be the character name and to the right of the will have the characters current level. The hp bar will be red in color and decrease "to the left" in conjunction when the player takes damage and hit points are decreased from the total max hit points. The bar will also increase to the right when the player regains health from using a health restore potion or a health restore spell. The characters mana bar works just as the summon mana bar. Read summon mana bar for a description on it. The character turn bar will start out fully decreased meaning you will not see it. Once the battle has started the bar will start to increase and once it has fully increased to its max it will be the characters turn and he can attack, summon, flee etc. Enemy display box: The enemy display box will represent the enemy statistics that the player is battling with. At the top left of the box there will be a picture of the enemy. To the right of that will be the enemy name and to the right of that will be the enemy's level. The enemy hp bar represents the enemy's current health condition. It will decrease and increase as needed. The text hp points will also increase and decrease as needed in conjunction with the hp bar. The enemy turn bar works just as the characters turn bar. Read character turn bar above under Character display box for more information on it. The green box outlining the enemy character box in the top left of the picture will indicate on the players move, when he selects to attack and enemy, that he is currently selecting this enemy to attack. The player will be able to switch between enemy's to attack and when the player switches enemy's to attack the green highlight will move over to the new enemy character box to show that this enemy is now currently selected.

It's 'special'

It's well laid out, although maybe a little unoriginal. One thing is I don't see where a text box would be for messages and the sort, I'm guessing in the middle. Also, I personally would prefer numbers for turn order instead of bars, just because you might just be waiting around for the bars to fill up sometimes. Scrolling menus would be nice too, since you'll probably have a lot of items/specials. I like the green box.

Quote:

Original post by smog890 The green box outlining the enemy character box in the top left of the picture will indicate on the players move, when he selects to attack and enemy, that he is currently selecting this enemy to attack. The player will be able to switch between enemy's to attack and when the player switches enemy's to attack the green highlight will move over to the new enemy character box to show that this enemy is now currently selected.

This implies the game will display a number of 'enemy character box' thingies at once, one for each enemy currently present in battle... if that's correct, then you may have quite a problem with battles that involve more than a couple enemies... namely, their character boxes will fill the screen to the point where there's hardly any room left for the actual battle to show.

You might want to try a column of 'mini enemy boxes' along either the top or one of the screen edges, with the box reduced to just the enemy's portrait and maybe the hp and/or turn bar under it ... have the green border on one of them mark the currently selected enemy, and present the full size character box for that particular enemy in the upper corner along the oposite edge?

The green box around the en box represents, say, when it's char 1's turn and he picks attack and then when, say, the mouse is over the en box it will highlight green to show that he is selecting that one. When the mouse moves off the box or he selects to attack that enemy the green outline will not show then.

Im confused. The two mana bars that each character have. Are the same? and if so, why? that also means that it is confusing :p

The second mana bar that says summon mana bar is for the summon spirits mana. It tells how much mana the summon spirit has left. Read summon mana bar under images for a little more detail.

hmmm already leaning stuff that will confuse the player lol.

Quote:

Original post by smog890 The green box around the en box represents, say, when it's char 1's turn and he picks attack and then when, say, the mouse is over the en box it will highlight green to show that he is selecting that one.

I understand... what i meant was, the description of the battle system makes it sound like the player selects an enemy to attack by putting the mouse or whatever over either that enemy's box or the enemy in the main battle view (and the box for that particular enemy is highlighted with green border to indicate it) ... which means, in order to provide the player with this kind of feedback, you need to somehow show them *all* the selections they can make. And if you have say, battle with 4 players against 6 monsters, if you tried to draw the enemy boxes for all the characters at once, so you can the put green border around the one the player selects as target, to let them know this is the one they selected... you'd likely run out of screen space to show the actual battle ^^;;

NOTE: I realized my images were a bit big to embed (1024x768) so I provided clickable links to them instead.


This is just my personal opinion, but I think you have too much of your valuable screen space consumed by menus and such. I like to keep the menu/status bars to an absolute minimum so I can keep myself focused on the center of the action. We've had some discussion and ideas thrown around for the battle layout in my game. Allow me to share them with you all. [smile]



First draft

Ok, in here A1/B1 correspond to the character portraits. A2/B2 are for status icons, etc. A3/B3 are the actual character sprites. The colored circles around A1/B1 are the skill bars (kinda like mana, but works differently in my game). The colored numbers above A2/B2 is the character's HP. The number at the top right is the number of character swaps the player has (again, something specific to my game). The "action menu" at the bottom pops up only when a player can take an action, otherwise it's hidden.

It was a good start I thought, but we can do better.



Second draft

By the time this draft came up we decided to think of the battle layout in terms of a grid of tiles (for simplification reasons). It's 16 tiles wide and 12 tiles tall I believe. The top 2 rows of tiles are for the menu. The left two columns are for player sprites. The bottom 2 rows are for the pop-up battle menu. The rest of the area is for enemy sprites (which can be any size, but have to be in dimensions of tiles (so we can easily map any number of enemies into the battle map). The yellow rectangles are player and enemy sprites.


Not anything "innovative" here really, but it really helped to think in terms of tiles on where things were going to go.



Third draft

In this draft I realized that by taking the top and bottom 2 rows, the area of action was very wide, but not very tall. Why not move one of the menus to be a column instead? Sure it's different and the player might not be used to it, but just because we deviate from the "standard" way of doing things doesn't mean we're wrong. [smile]

In this, I dedicated an extra row for player sprites. I also moved the top menu to be the left column and the bottom menu to be the top menu. So directly to the left of every character sprite would be their portrait, HP, skill bar, status, etc (making it really easy to match a character with their stats). The top left corner would have the character swap counter. The top 2 rows would be the collapsable action menu.

I also thought we should have a "neutral ground" column between the player and enemy areas, because having an enemy sitting directly to the right of a player may look rather awkward.




So those are some of my/our ideas on what we're putting into our battle layout design. It's still not finalized but we'll see what happens. We were supposed to have our battle code a long time ago, but unfortunately the developer I hired to work on it wrote excuses instead of code, so I asked him to leave. [mad]

If you want you might make the menus traslucent so the player knows what's behind them.

Quote:

Original post by Coz If you want you might make the menus traslucent so the player knows what's behind them.

Yeah, actually that was something we've intended from the beginning. I just didn't mention it. [smile]