“God dammit what the fuck happend!? Why did I die!?”

As a designer, it’s your fault this happend. Why did your player die? How much damage does a weapon even do? When did the enemy score a goal? Sure, you might know all this, but you need to shove the information up your player’s throat in order for them to understand your game. Bite size chunks, I should add.



This is what the game’s UI currently looks like. It’s ugly, but it does the job. Or so I thought. You have all the information you need:

The score is being tracked at the top of the screen



Boost recharge bar (the green thingy)



Ammo counter



Amount of HP is visible at all times

Yet the players still didn’t know why they died, or why the rocket launcher suddenly stopped working. The players are focusing on the action - the cars. They never look at the corners of the screen. The information is there, yes, but I had to somehow make the players pay attention to it.

The way I solved this problem was by making a health bar appear underneath the car each time it lost HP, and making it disappear again after about 2 seconds. This forced players to look at it, because it was right there in the action zone, but just long enough for them to ingest the information, and then back to killing eachother. There are some important things to note here.

First of all, I decided to go for a bar, instead of numbers. The numbers are more accurate, but they aren’t as easy to understand as a green bar that changes colour and becomes shorter in proportion to the HP left.

Second, I had to give players something to compare it’s size to. The bar got shorter as they lost HP, but behind it, there is always another black bar that shows how much 100% would be (title image).

Third, making the bar dissapear ensures that the players get the information they need and are able to go back to the game without always being distracted by their HP. Sure, they could miss the bar first time they get hit, but they will notice that something popped up, and by next time, they will surely pay attention to it.

Now I need to make them understand when they run out of ammo, lose / score a point and when their boost recharges. I don’t know if everything will work out the way I plan it, but that’s what testing is for.