[Jon Alma]

t the moment I am working on the combat handling in Legends. So far combat has been limited to NPCs deciding when and who to attack, closing in on the target and then waving a sword around or running through a parry animation pretty much at random.

The current step is to coordinate the animations, deciding on who takes the initiative, whether a hit was successful and as a consequence which animations should be used (hit taken, death, parry, dodge, etc, etc). Nothing too difficult there (beyond a lot of tweaking of the initiative calculations).

However, I do have a problem related to this in that I need to work out how to communicate to the player the current health of NPCs and the damage they are taking (beyond the generic 'ouch' animations). first off Legends is (if you don't already know) a real-time combat first person 3D game engine where I am trying to maximise the space given over to visuals to maximise the player emmersion. Secondly, I've always been against showing the numbers - there is quite a complex set of RPG rules number crunching away in the background, but much of this will be hidden if possible (the player should get indications of what is going on but not hard numbers).

With this in mind the ideal solution for me would be to adapt the NPC animations so that a badly injured NPC would look injured - sword dragging on the ground, shield not held properly, shoulders sagging, etc. However, doing this would be too much for me - this is a solo project, doing animations is incredibly time consuming, and in any I would need to differentiate between different (e.g. 100%, 75%, 50%, 25%) health levels to make the system work.

As a result I am looking for another solution and have bumped up against the following combination,

- Health bars floating above the NPC
- '15 points of damage' signs when a hit is taken.

Personally I really dislike the damage signs even if it is very popular in a lot of games - for me it turns the game into an exercise in number crunching. As a result I'm looking at just using a heath bar type solution, but here there is potential problem with having the same health bar for NPCs of very different levels - I am toying with altering the colour of the bar so that a powerful character will have a more red bar and a weak opponent a greener bar.

Would anyone have any suggestions or advice either for improving the health bar system or replacing it with another solution?

Jon.
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Legends from the Lost Realms

[Hajo]

Personally I'm ok with floating numbers, and bar-style health displays.

What I used in a past project were comic-like stars upon a connecting attack, and the size of the star gave an idea how hard the attack hit. There was also a number displayed, but the size of the star was way easier and immediate to 'read'.

For the NPC state problem, you could try to alter the textures? Scars, blood, bruises might be visible signs, if you want to adventure into the less serious regions of display, you can try bandages and patches as well (works well as sign of 'being hurt', but is silly in the context of realtime battle).

Another idea might be to change the saturation of the textures ... like have them fade to gray, and they die when loosing all color, aka health. Should be fairly easy with 3D systems, maybe changing saturation and hue works even better?

Other than that I'm out of ideas, but I'll watch this thread with interest, because questions of "immersion sustaining feedback" are very interesting to me :)

[Jon Alma]