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[Rostiger]

So yeah, I thought it'd be good if we started to share ideas about interface design and layout as well as putting down how it should work and what needs to be done.

To get the ball rolling, I wrote up a couple of ideas and considerations that should help us get things straightened out.

The Game Modes

To figure out which information needs to be displayed during a battle it is mandatory to take a good look at the different game modes and iron out details to make sure that everything is covered and fits nicely together in the end.
So here we go:

• Standard Mode "Last Man Standing"
  Each player has a set number of lives. Naturally, if a player dies, one live is subtracted. The game ends, when there is only one player left.
  Another option could be that as soon as one player runs out of lives, the game ends. This makes matches ruinable for all players by one person easier though. Personally I'd prefer the Last Man Standing variation.
  
• Time Mode
  Score a point for every kill, but lose a point for every death. The battle ends when the set time runs out. Winner is the player with the most points.
  
• Frag Mode
  Score a point for every kill. In this mode, the player has no lives (not to mix up with hitpoints) and the winner is determined by whoever reaches a set number of points first.
  
• Team Standard Mode
  As standard mode, but with teams. The game ends when one team is completely wiped out.
  
• Team Time Mode
  As time mode, but each team shares a single score.
  
• Team Frag Mode
  As frag mode, but each team shares a single number of kills.
  
• Tug of War Mode
  The battle consists of two teams. There is a single bar at the top of the screen with a marker in the middle. Dealing damage moves it in one direction, and taking damage moves it to the other. Win by moving the marker all the way to your opponents’ side.
  

Interface Items

So let's get all the sepparate items together that are needed to display every information that is important to the player:

• Portrait
  Quite self explanatory and already implemented. However there needs to be some sort of indication on the portrait and on the player sprite, if two people play the same character in one game. It should be something  neutral, possibly without the use of colors, since colors should be used to distinguish different team members.
  Any ideas on this?
  
• Hitpoints
  Every character has a set number of hitpoints that is displayed by some sort of bar that fills or becomes empty (whichever works better) upon being hit. Is a character low on Hitpoints, some kind of warning sign should be displayed.
  
• Lives/Score
  In most game modes, every character has a number besides his portrait that either represents the lives or the score, depending on the chosen game mode.
  
• Special Ability Meter
  Some characters have special abilities that unleash at a certain point. Therefore they have an extra bar near their portrait that fills under certain conditions. Once the bar is full, there should be some sort of indication that the special ability can be used.
  
• Team Indicator
  When a team game mode is chosen, the interface must change in a way the players can easily distinguish, who belongs to which team. Technically it doesn't make much difference, since friendly fire should be disabled, but it will give the player a better overview on who's who and where.
  I suggest using the classic two color layout. Each team has one color (red and blue, maybe? ) that is present in the character portraits and on the character sprites.
  Also the screen should be split for the portraits, so all portraits of one team are on the left side and the others on the right.
  Each side can have four players (or should we allow matches like 2 vs 6 too?) and the portraits are added from the center towards the sides.
  
• Team ScoreI/Time
  In a Team Time Mode and Team Frag Mode the teams share a single score. It should be centered and larger than the usual Lives/Score display on character portraits (which are disabled for these two modes, by the way).
  
• Tug of War Meter
  In Tug of War the portrait layout is like in the other team modes, but below a meter is displayed that covers about a third of the screen width. In the center of it is a vertical bar that moves left or right, depending on which team currently deals more damage.
  

Did I forget anything?

Interface Mockups

I was tinkering with some graphics already and wanted to share them with you:



I thought it might be a good idea to use the portrait space as a hitpoints bar too, so I could save some space to make the score display better visible. As you can see, I also moved the Special Ability Meter below the portrait, also out of space issues, so the score has enough space for two digits.

For warning displays I had something quite simple in mind, like this:

   

I haven't yet done anything for team displays or Tug of War Meter, but stuff will (hopefully) follow sometime soon.

Also I'd like to mention that nothing here is written in stone. These are just basics taken and thought through a bit further, adding my ideas and thoughts. I do not want to usurp this project (it's a community project, after all), so please give feedback, add your own ideas, hit me over the head for design faults, post your own mockup variations or get crazy and dance a little jig! It helps! 

In short:

DISCUSS!
Or dance! Or both!

[Valter]

I would recommend making the red damage gradient a little bit lighter, so that you can still tell who is underneath it.

A Team Indicator is good, but you should probably just have an individual indicator instead. If two people are playing the same character in a fight, there needs to be a way to distinguish them.

[godsavant]

Time Mode is a bit puzzling to me, since it doesn't involve time at all...it's basically a kills-deaths version of Frag Mode. Just a misnomer, nothing serious.

Second on Valter's suggestion of lightening the gradient. Obviously, the portrait doesn't much matter once players know what part of the screen they're displayed, but we do want to show off the gorgeous artwork.

At first, I was going to suggest making the flashing special bar more obnoxiously psychedelic when filled, but on second thought, it could be like Samus's charge - the player knows when it's charged, but the others won't unless they're really paying attention. Great work as always, Kovski.

[medieval]

The time mode should actually be about who gets the highest number of kills when the time runs out, I think.

[Rostiger]

I would recommend making the red damage gradient a little bit lighter, so that you can still tell who is underneath it.

Second on Valter's suggestion of lightening the gradient. Obviously, the portrait doesn't much matter once players know what part of the screen they're displayed, but we do want to show off the gorgeous artwork.

Done! 

A Team Indicator is good, but you should probably just have an individual indicator instead. If two people are playing the same character in a fight, there needs to be a way to distinguish them.

Hmm, I don't know, an individual indicator certainly helps to distinguish double characters, but for teamplay it would be a bit confusing if everybody had one. I'd prefer a simple, unobstrusive, yet distinguishable solution.

How about using little flags for the players that are layed beneath each player sprite? It could be used for teamcolors as well as for distinguishing between double characters.

Great work as always, Kovski.

Thanks! 

The time mode should actually be about who gets the highest number of kills when the time runs out, I think.

Yeah, sounds logical. Maybe Brain Soup had something specific in mind.
Let's hear his opinion, then I'll change it.

[KennEH!]

Won't the charters have different colours?

[Rostiger]

By "Charters" you mean the containers of the portraits?
If so yes, that's a valid point. I guess it's not mandatory to give every player a flag in team color, it could even do more harm than good, now that I think about it.
Also later there will be hopefully more characters than possible players, so double characters shouldn't be too frequent.

But in case it does happen, I think this could be quite an ok option:

[Soulliard]

So yeah, I thought it'd be good if we started to share ideas about interface design and layout as well as putting down how it should work and what needs to be done.

This is a good discussion. I approve.  

Time Mode
Score a point for every kill, but lose a point for every death. The points represent your lives - if the player runs out of lives, he is excluded from the battle. The battle ends when there is only one player left or one player reaches a previously set number of points.

As others have mentioned, this mode is timed. So there ought to be a time display.

However there needs to be some sort of indication on the portrait and on the player sprite, if two people play the same character in one game. It should be something  neutral, possibly without the use of colors, since colors should be used to distinguish different team members.

I see two solutions for this.
The Easy Method- Blend the second character with a certain color. It may not look as nice, but it should be easy to implement. Also, this could allow an unlimited number of color variations.

The Difficult Method- We could create different costumes (aka color swaps) for each character. This would require a second set of graphics for every character, so it would take more effort, especially if we wanted to create a third costume. If we didn't make a third costume, then we might have to resort to color blending anyway, and we'd have to use color blending for team modes. For non-team game modes, this would look nicer. With so many characters to choose from, though, we would need to decide whether the effort is worth it.


Those mockups look very nice, by the way. Currently, the camera system doesn't work with non-rectangular HUDs, but I'm sure there's a better way to do things.

[Rostiger]

Alright, original post has been updated.

The Difficult Method- We could create different costumes (aka color swaps) for each character. This would require a second set of graphics for every character, so it would take more effort, especially if we wanted to create a third costume. If we didn't make a third costume, then we might have to resort to color blending anyway, and we'd have to use color blending for team modes. For non-team game modes, this would look nicer. With so many characters to choose from, though, we would need to decide whether the effort is worth it.

How about the suggestion with the flags in my previous post? Couldn't those be positioned beneath the character sprite? Then we'd save ourselves the (probably impossible) task to make all animations twice...

Those mockups look very nice, by the way. Currently, the camera system doesn't work with non-rectangular HUDs, but I'm sure there's a better way to do things.

Yeah ok, depends on the effort, I guess... I could also make everything rectangular..?

[Soulliard]

Sorry, I didn't see the flags post. That could work, as long as the flags were displayed similarly to items.

The problem with the drawing non-rectangular HUDs is that I'm currently displaying the HUD by showing it in a separate view, so it is not destroyed by the scaling. I'm going to see if I can display it in some other way, since it's somewhat inefficient, but I don't know whether I'll find much success.

[Rostiger]

Sorry, I didn't see the flags post. That could work, as long as the flags were displayed similarly to items.

No problem - if nobody objects, I'll take it into the first post. I think this could work pretty well.

The problem with the drawing non-rectangular HUDs is that I'm currently displaying the HUD by showing it in a separate view, so it is not destroyed by the scaling. I'm going to see if I can display it in some other way, since it's somewhat inefficient, but I don't know whether I'll find much success.

Hmm, what exactly has the sepparate view to do with displaying rounded corners of HUD graphics? Or did I miss something here? 

Ah also, here a suggestion for team modes:



Whatchoo thinkin? 

[EDIT]
Oh, and also FYI:



[/EDIT]

[Soulliard]

Hmm, what exactly has the sepparate view to do with displaying rounded corners of HUD graphics? Or did I miss something here? 

Views are rectangular.

One other thing to take into account is that games will rarely consist of 8 players, since only two can really fit on one keyboard, so everyone else will need to use controllers.

[godsavant]

A quick question, and this is going to sound stupid b/c I don't know much about computers: If I don't have controllers (which I don't), can I just have 4-player via plugging an extra keyboard into my comp?

Okay, yeah, that did sound stupid.

[Hideous]

You can, actually.

[godsavant]

You can, actually.

 

[KennEH!]

As long as the buttons are different.

[William Broom]

I don't really like the flags that hang on the player's sprite. They just look, I dunno, goofy. Palette swaps would have issues too, especially with Quote.

I'm also pretty skeptical about 8-player battles. Unless the map was massive, these battles would probably end up as huge clusterfucks with very little strategy involved. I'm pretty sure no fighting game has ever pulled off more than 4 players in a battle. There are some that have tried but they all turned out pretty badly. I think Smash Bros. has kept its 4-player limit as a design choice rather than a technical limitation.

It's worth trying it at least once. But I suspect that once you get over the novelty of having 8 players at once, it won't be particularly enjoyable.

[Rostiger]

I don't really like the flags that hang on the player's sprite. They just look, I dunno, goofy. Palette swaps would have issues too, especially with Quote.

It would only be for double characters, which will be rare enough, so I still think it's a pretty good solution. But I guessin this case a color blend could do ok too...

I'm also pretty skeptical about 8-player battles. Unless the map was massive, these battles would probably end up as huge clusterfucks with very little strategy involved. I'm pretty sure no fighting game has ever pulled off more than 4 players in a battle. There are some that have tried but they all turned out pretty badly. I think Smash Bros. has kept its 4-player limit as a design choice rather than a technical limitation.

It's worth trying it at least once. But I suspect that once you get over the novelty of having 8 players at once, it won't be particularly enjoyable.

Yeah, also it'd be a pain to test it, because a) you have to get eight people together to play it and b) you have to have six controllers and one keybopard or four controllers and two keyboards. Howevery I could imagine it enjoyable jsut because of the complete chaos that will rule the game. I think I could get a lot of fun out of that, but maybe that's just me.

Rationally, we probably should consider cutting it down to six players? 

[godsavant]

I'd say stick with four players. As with most games, any match w/ more than five participants will involve more dying than anything else. You can't really focus your attacks on any one enemy, since the small stages mean that someone will backstab you within a few seconds. What usually ends up happening is five or six people scrambling aimlessly around the stage, punching and shooting at random in the hopes of dealing more lucky hits than they recieve.

[mokesmoe]

I think Smash Bros. has kept its 4-player limit as a design choice rather than a technical limitation.

This is very true.
In melee and brawl, you could fight the big groups of enemys with 5 cpus at a time.
This means 6 max in melee and 7 in brawl (because of co-op)
By using cheats you could play these battles with all Ice climbers without lag.
The game could handle it, and even had it programed in, so nintendo must of chosen not to have it in the game.