Can I get feedback for my new LT FE HUD?

All the items in a unit’s inventory are visible at a glance.
All the Skills a unit has are visible at a glance.
All the stats of a unit has are visible at a glance.

But then I thought about the ATK stat. Weapon’s Might plus your Strength, plus or minus any number of other effects like Personal Skills and Buff and Debuff staffs and more.
Isn’t that more important than knowing your exact Strength stat?

So I replaced the Strength stat with the Attack stat.
But the Magic stat is still also there because there is only room for six stats there and my game removed the Luck and Skill stats because my game is no luck, all skill.
Even though if a unit has a magic weapon equipped like a book or magic sword, ATK will be displayed and MAG will also be displayed.
I thought about coding it so it displays ATK and STR, or ATK and MAG, depending on whether the equipped weapon is magic or not, but then I didn’t.

What do you think of this HUD?
I wanted to make sure it could fit within the screen size of a GBA even though my game uses the screen size of a 3DS now.

5 Likes

My suggestion would be to replace Speed with Attack Speed. Having your actual effective attack, with weapon Mt, skills, etc. factored in, but not having the same for AS like most GBA HUDs nowadays seems like a missed opportunity.

8 Likes

Raw Mag and Spd aren’t important to the player’s quick analysis. The stats on display should be pre-cumulated as much as possible for ease of use - in my opinion, including any always-on skills (Stat+, including Life & Death, auras ie Charm, Charisma, Demoiselle).

Attack / AttackSpeed / Protection / Resilience are, and Movement is, but in LT, Mov is also already shown whenever you hover/press on a unit. Having a number in the panel is redundant with the move squares.

So I’d recommend trimming to just those so that instead of having a 2x3 block you have a 1x4 - Bump it a few pixels to the right of where they currently start, to separate it from the HP/name, possibly adding some vertical space between the numbers so they’re also more legible. You could probably trim the box’s width little, too.

Only design your UI for your game’s actual screen. This UI is impossibly massive for the GBA’s real estate - it’s 168x80. Just look -

image

Even if we remove an item and skill to make a vertical stats column,
image

It’s obnoxiously large and gets in the way. A GBA-sized UI does not have room for this much information at these sizes. The play field still has to be visible underneath the various elements.

5 Likes

personally think this UI looks abysmal at 3DS sizes and should use new graphical assets to be more readable and less ugly with the font since you have so much space now

The tiny terrain info box floating in the bottom right very, very far away from anything else you’re looking at is kinda yucky!

But that’s from a graphics design standpoint. Mostly the important critique I have is that the text size ought to be increased a bit. You don’t have to cram it in like that.

Speed is Attack Speed in my game. There are no effects that alter Attack Speed like CON or a weapon effect or personal skills to make it different from actual Speed.

Sounds good. If I reduce the stats to just those 4, there should be enough room left for the inventory and skill icons…

image

Yep, it looks great now on GBA screen size and my current 3DS screen size.

I thought about drawing each weapon’s Might onto weapon icons so newcomers can see at a glance what each weapon is worth but that might get in the way of icon readability. And players might not look closer at the weapons to see the unique effects some of them have.

image

How does this look now?
No, the font doesn’t get any smaller than this. The game doesn’t have any smaller fonts built in.

1 Like

This looks pretty cool but I think consolidating it a bit would be a good move

3 Likes

I can’t consolidate any further without throwing away vital info like what the foe has besides the currently equipped weapon, enemy skills, or enemy DEF/RES.

I have thought about giving every enemy a universal “Anti-Damage” stat, and giving all classes skills that raise or lower this damage based on what would normally happen when a Melee Unit attacks a General, when a Melee Unit attacks a Mage, when a Mage attacks a General, and so on. But that would be a massive overhaul and I’m already technically doing a massive overhaul by getting Crit/Anticrit/Avoid and directly adjusting class stats to replicate their effects before scrapping Skill/Luck/Crit/Anticrit/Avoid/Hit/Proc Skills. I want my game to be “All Skill, no Luck”.

1 Like

How often do enemies have how many items in their satchels? It’s fairly unusual in vanilla games, for units to have even three items. Do you need to show six items on all units?

I do not think this is particularly important - how often are you really intending for generic units to have non-predictable skill loadouts?

Plenty of people rag on skills being numerous, and tons of complaints about how hard it gets when the skills given are unpredictable are out there.

Of course, the answer to those are on your game’s design, so it may be the case that you do want to have many demarcated skills on units or fairly involved inventories.

2 Likes

Imagine moving a unit close to an enemy with a Steel Sword in their UI and then getting jumpscared when they pull out a Beastkiller or Armorslayer and oneshot your unit. Foes might not have large inventories with droppable items every map, but it might happen sometimes, and I thought I should design the UI with that in mind.

dont effective weapons trigger an exclamation sign hazard when selecting a unit that is vulnerable to such weaponry with most up-to-date QoLs

That’s a good idea. Do you think it’s worth adding those icons to the Inventory section of the HUD so you can see exactly which items are effective?

no

because just knowing that some weapons are effective doesnt lead to them being effective to the units you are using - which is the intention of those exclamation marks bound to the selected vulnerable units

and all bows would trigger that by default

also that wasnt an idea that was just me telling you that QoL on GBA displays warnings on enemies with relevant effective weaponry

while selecting your unit (which is what makes it relevant)

you’d have to differentiate such small icons in your case that you’d sacrifice both practicality and readability for something that can be done in a different, simpler way

I think I could fit really tiny icons there. I could shrink that bubble the exclamation point is in… Or get rid of it and directly add the exclanation point to the weapon icon.

image

How does that look?

Displaying more than one item, sure. But do you need six? Three is already a lot of items for enemies to bear.

How often do enemies have more than three items and how painful would it be to not know what their fourth item is? I personally can’t envision a scenario where you’d reasonably need to know four items of an enemy’s inventory.

A General with sword, axe, spear, and a droppable gem … doesn’t need to tell me that it has a droppable gem as much as it has the three weapons.
A Thief with sword and any amount of pilfered loot … doesn’t need to tell me what that loot is, because there was already a big pop-up about what the Thief stole when it got that item, I know I need to bring my own Thief up to steal it back or prevent it from snagging any more items.
A Swordmaster has no justifiable reason to bear a Silver Sword, Wo Dao, Zanbato/Longsword, and a Lancereaver.

Unrecognizable and nearly illegible. It looks more like part of the icon art than a separate element.

2 Likes

Jason, don’t add exclamation points there, period

they’re widely useless in that case and don’t account for different kits

dynamic warnings based in type effectiveness like it already exists is already there

1 Like

Yeah, the exclamation points look awful at that size. But I have the space to display more than 6 icons for skills and inventory items. I want everything important about the unit readable at a glance and hiding some skill/inventory icons for aesthetic purposes would only get in the way of that.

Besides, my game uses the screen size of the 3DS’s top screen. Plenty of room to display 4 rows containing all 8 unit stats that matter. ATK, AS, STR, MAG, SPD, MOV, DEF, and RES.

Or maybe 3 rows containing 3 stats.
ATK, AS, MOV
DEF, RES, BLK
STR, MAG, SPD

That last one, “Block”, could count the total of any defensive bonuses the unit gets from skills. -2 damage taken because of his personal skill, -2 damage taken because of her personal skill, -4 damage taken because of a Combat Art, that sort of thing.

I’ve been working on the Full HUD.

image

The screen that tells you everything about a unit. It’d be cool if everything important was on one screen without needing to flip through multiple pages per unit. I know, I know, the Inventory isn’t aligned with the stats yet, and the Skills/Statuses are missing and the WEXP indicators are gone, that bothers me too.

But which variant of the Full HUD do you like more, and why?

image

That one? Or this one?

image

Or I could stick as close to FE Fates’s inventory as possible while trying to change as little visually as possible and making just one page change left/right necessary to see everything that couldn’t fit on this screen?

image

Anyway here’s how it looks in the current build.