Status Bars
We’ve been working very hard to design and implement some nice status bars for a while now. We decided to scrap the HUD style status bars that were shown in the original alpha video. For Helheim, we think floating status bars that follow your player make more sense. You don’t want to glance to the edge of your screen somewhere to find out how much health or mana you currently have. It’s far easier to glance within a couple inches of your character.
So lets breakdown what you’re seeing here. The red and green are pretty straight forward health and stamina. You’ll also notice small and large notches in the healthbar. The small notches represent 10 health each and the large notches represent a health threshold. If you take no damage for a small amount of time, your health will regenerate up to the next threshold. The blue on the left is your mana. You generate mana by landing different attacks (the amount that they generate can vary). The mana is split into 4 “chunks”. All abilities that spend mana cost 1-4 “chunks” of your mana pool. This makes mana management a more straight forward choice and it makes it easier to recognize how many uses of what abilities you can use.
The last thing in this gif is a specialized bar for any ammo based ability. Here, the player with the dual daggers has the Shuriken equipped. They have 3 ammo before needing to reload, so you can see that under their health bar. This space will be used differently depending on how the ability functions. It can be used to represent cooldowns via a bar or abilities that charge up via a bar that fills up over time, for example. If you equip two abilities with such specialized bars, you’ll see a second bar show up under your health.
There’s still a decent bit to flesh out with them. For example, we’d like to prevent them from overlapping by having them push each other out of the way. We also implemented a feature so that when they overlap a player, they fade out a bit.. however we think that this feature needs some tuning as well. Lastly, it we’re considering coloring the borders or health values differently for each local player…
We think that, in the end, this interface will serve players nicely in allowing them to focus on the moment to moment tactical decisions.
Dash Differentiation
In Helheim, your equipped weapon is the core defining factor of your character’s play style. As such, different weapons can have entirely different dashes. Not just in terms of animation, but in terms of functionality as well. They can vary in how long they are, how many i-frames they have, and possibly work completely differently than most like our planned Sword and Shield (having a shield charge instead of a dodge).
On the left, the two dashes are equal in every way except their look. In the build on the right, we’ve significantly altered the physics of the Ultra Greatsword such that it will come to a stop much earlier.
(Side Note: I personally believe that the dashes in both of these gifs have too much distance, but we’re still playing around with this to get an idea of what feels good)
I believe that having the power to control how each weapon’s dash works individually is a great way to balance and further differentiate each weapon. However, in general, they should most likely fit within certain standards unless it really suits the weapon. Like for the Sword and Shield, for example.
Posted By: Eluem on 02/29/2016