Recently it occurred to me that the 2-dimensional display of skills or skill development were somewhat unnecessary. With that in mind, I developed a way to show skill growth in 3 dimensions. What I came up with was the 'skill cube'. An example of what I mean is below: As you can see, it consists of a colourful cube. Now, the special thing about this cube is that each of its faces represent a different character's skills. In this example, I used a colour to represent each of the greek elements. Red is fire, deep blue is water, light blue or aqua is air, and green is earth. Each face is a different character (say for an RPG), and each square represents a character's skill in one particular area. Of course, it's possible to use other shapes should we desire a non-square number of skills, but in this example I use a cube for my own sanity in drawing and to keep it simple. Here we see a cube after the party has levelled up: As you can see, certain colours are extruded. These represent increased skills. Top-face has levelled up his 'Earth' skill, while Left-face has levelled up her 'Fire' skill, and Right-face has levelled up her 'Water' skill. As experience in each area increases, these areas will extrude further. In this next example, top-face has levelled up his 'Air' skill and 'Earth' skill to an equal level, and neglected his 'Water' and 'Fire' skills, while Left-face increases her 'Fire' skill to a high level and Right-face does likewise with 'Water'. How do you think this would work as a user interface, were the cube easily turnable and rotatable?

i dont like it,
because it is not user friendly,
you are trying to make something innonative at the cost of performance/friendlyness .
you will get more information if you used the causal way (bars or labels with their corrensponding stats).

It is not terribly easy to read, and it creates pointless restrictions on character/stat number. What if The game just started and I have only one character in my party? what if I have two? How do you deal with that? What if they have 7 stats? What if I don't want to look at the stats of all my characters at once? What if I want to quickly see who in my party has the highest or lowest of a certain stat without the clutter of all the rest of the data?

In your specific example, what if the top face character's earth (green) is much higher than his air (light blue)? I wouldn't even be able to see the Air stat at all.

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Original post by JasRonq It is not terribly easy to read, and it creates pointless restrictions on character/stat number. What if The game just started and I have only one character in my party? what if I have two? How do you deal with that? What if they have 7 stats? What if I don't want to look at the stats of all my characters at once? What if I want to quickly see who in my party has the highest or lowest of a certain stat without the clutter of all the rest of the data? In your specific example, what if the top face character's earth (green) is much higher than his air (light blue)? I wouldn't even be able to see the Air stat at all.

How would you recommend making it easier to read?

On character number - simply blot out a side you're not using, or else have the shape change depending on how many members are in your party. For four characters, use a triangular-based pyramid, for example. Though I can see problems with this approach were we to get below four members.

This would be one of several views of stats, among other, more typical ones, but it has the advantage, in my mind, of being largely easy to see the strengths and weaknesses of each character - it's a 3-d bar chart. Also, the stronger the party is, the larger the cube would grow. As for number of skills - if you can break a square into that many equal pieces, you have your skill display.It's relatively easy, for example, to break a square into 3 parts.

The stats obscuring other stats would not be a problem in an actual representation - the cube would be 3d and fully rotatable.

lemme put it this way, what does this method add to usability and what restrictions does it introduce? In my mind, you are needlessly complicating something that is normally straight forward, causing players to learn something new when something familiar would work just as well. You don't really add anything with this method that isn't there with a simple bar chart, yet you create difficulties such as representation with fewer than 4 party members, changing shapes with added party members, and probably more.

But it's pretty.

Ah well, another aborted concept.