[AaronWizardstar]

I was originally going to ask your opinions on some GUI design in the Design subforum, then decided I might as well make a thread for my whole project. So without further adieu...

Wizardstar




Blog (though I should probably update it more often)
Bitbucket


Wizardstar is going to be a space fantasy strategy RPG in the vein of Shining Force and Fire Emblem. The "space fantasy" part is not apparent since I'm using David Gervais' tiles as placeholders as I develop the game itself, but eventually I want to have magical soldiers with glowing energy swords in landscapes that look like 70s prog-rock album covers. And golems that look suspiciously like giant anime robots.

This game is being written in Ruby using the Gosu game library.

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Right now it's possible to move characters around and I just implemented attack range highlighting yesterday. Soon I want to implement actual attacks. Which means I have to implement character hit points, which will be called "stamina". Which means I have to decide how to show a character's stamina.

As a preface, stamina will be a percentage instead of a value which increases with character power. Instead of increasing stamina, characters will increase their Defence rating to reduce the amount of damage they receive from attacks. Which amounts to the same thing when you think about it. Stamina and damage will have a granularity of 5%, so all characters will get 20 stamina points.

I figure I can either show stamina on top of each character, in the control panel at the bottom, or both.

Understand that the control panel will include other things such as the character's selected weapon, selected skill or spell, and terrain dependent stat modifiers.

Putting the stamina bar on top of each character makes it easy to see how much stamina everyone has at a glance and makes room in the control panel where I'll want to put other stuff, but their small size makes it hard to see how much stamina anyone has exactly and I have to choose whether to obscure the stamina bar or the character sprite. Putting the stamina bar in the control panel clears up the character sprites and can be increased in size for readability, but it leaves less room for what I will put in the control panel later and you can only see the stamina of the currently selected character. Putting stamina bars both over the characters and in the control panel combines many of the strengths of the previous two approaches and minimizes a few of the weaknesses, but it still takes up room in the control panel and it feels a little redundant for some reason.

The reason I'm a little concern about screen real-estate in the control panel is because I might want to port this to mobile devices when I'm finished.

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I've started many projects that I eventually abandoned, and I'm really hoping that this will be the one project I finish. That's the reason I payed money for a domain and hosting in order to set up my blog. Wish me luck people.

[tcaudilllg]

Well get a demo running first, and then go from there. :)