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[FlanPlan]

Thoughts? Improvements? Please share my beautiful people.

[Tanner Fruit Fly]

I would just watch out for the red text on top of those rectangle boxes at the top where the level and experience are being displayed. I would make the text black just so it stands out and doesn't blend in with the already red box.

I also think having the health bars below each enemy is unnecessary, I'd take those out to avoid screen clutter in a game that's already gonna be pretty chaotic.. You also have some reaaallly tiny text above those barcode looking graphics (I'm not 100% sure what those are just from looking at this image). I think you can take that text out too since you already have the Player 1/2 tags at the top of the window.

Other than that, I think you've got a pretty alright looking setup here. You leave plenty of breathing room on the screen for the actual action to happen which is ideal!

[FlanPlan]

I would just watch out for the red text on top of those rectangle boxes at the top where the level and experience are being displayed. I would make the text black just so it stands out and doesn't blend in with the already red box.

I also think having the health bars below each enemy is unnecessary, I'd take those out to avoid screen clutter in a game that's already gonna be pretty chaotic.. You also have some reaaallly tiny text above those barcode looking graphics (I'm not 100% sure what those are just from looking at this image). I think you can take that text out too since you already have the Player 1/2 tags at the top of the window.

Other than that, I think you've got a pretty alright looking setup here. You leave plenty of breathing room on the screen for the actual action to happen which is ideal!

Thank you! I was actually not too sure about the text where the level and stuff was and I totally forgot about the text over the multipliers haha Also I was planning on outlining all of the plain red text with a black outline. I'll limit the healthbars to only the bosses as well. 

[Kmany]

A good thing to do, well, when doing anything in color.. is to learn about complementary and analogous colors.

Complementary colors are two colors that, when mixed cancels each other out and become grey, but when placed next to each other gives great color contrast.

Examples.
Red and Green.
Blue and Orange.

Analogous colors are colors that are next to eachother on the color wheel.
Red and Orange
Yellow and green

Taking the exact complementary color, can sometimes make the other color "jump out" so you have to experiment and see what works and what does not work.

For your UI, I would probably experiment with making the text a light green or more orange..
Black is something you usually should avoid. You could try replacing it with a very dark(almost black) color like dark blue, and see how that looks.

Hope that helps.


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[FlanPlan]

A good thing to do, well, when doing anything in color.. is to learn about complementary and analogous colors.

Complementary colors are two colors that, when mixed cancels each other out and become grey, but when placed next to each other gives great color contrast.

Examples.
Red and Green.
Blue and Orange.

Analogous colors are colors that are next to eachother on the color wheel.
Red and Orange
Yellow and green

Taking the exact complementary color, can sometimes make the other color "jump out" so you have to experiment and see what works and what does not work.

For your UI, I would probably experiment with making the text a light green or more orange..
Black is something you usually should avoid. You could try replacing it with a very dark(almost black) color like dark blue, and see how that looks.

Hope that helps.

I made a lot of the text in the player info hud green with a darker green outline and it popped out a lot more and was twice as visible. I had heard about complementary colors, but didn't know what each colors compliment was haha so thank you very much for clearing that up and thank you tons for the feedback!

[FlanPlan]

Just wanted to show you what it is looking like now. Still need to take away the tiny healthbars.

[zephyr1125]

I think the numbers are too small for my sight

[FlanPlan]

I think the numbers are too small for my sight

In the options you can adjust the size of the hud and the numbers! 

[tankorsmash]

Yeah maybe it's different in fullscreen, but in the screenshots the top UI is tiny!

The quantity of weapons you have or something under the health boxes overlap.

It would be nice if the timer was zero padded. I don't have a good reason other than convention.

"Wave 3 Score 0" on the right probably should be separated a bit so it doesn't seem like their attached.

The "Player 2" in blue probably blends into the background while you're playing.

There's a lot going on but I like it.

[Quicksand-T]

I think it might look nicer if that HUD had its own dedicated part of the screen instead of being superimposed on top of the main action.

[Leaghorn]

I would make a separate semi transparent GUI bar at the bottom and placed there all the statistics that are in that two boxes at the top, make it bigger of course to it's easlier readable, and just leave scores, waves and kills at the top.

The text at the top I would make with big digits and small labels. Once you read the label you know what is where so the label don't have to be as large as that "KILLS". And of course "Score" and "Kills" not "SCORE" and "KILLS". Score digits on the sides, in the middle "KillsNumber / WaveNumber" with their small labels over them (or under them). Big numbers, small text. And I would make the outline more subtle.

[Waynetron]

So much going on. You really need to simplify it.
With bullet hell games, there's so much visual noise with all the bullets and ships and explosions. Adding a tonne of UI on top of that is going to be bad.

Be brutal about it, remove anything that isn't needed. Does 'wave 1' need to be there. Do we need to know how many kills have been made. Do we need the timer? Can the user infer 'player 1' and 'player 2' simply by the placement.
The easiest way to make it look better is going to be by reducing it as much as possible.

Once you've got the bare minimum. Then you can reduce the visual noise even further with the styling. Having a border around text adds noise, having a box underneath adds noise. Remove embellishments, remove colons.
You want it to be clear with the smallest number of things possible. Maybe try plain white text. White won't clash with anything else except really light colours / white. And it doesn't look like you're using white anywhere else on the screen.

Then you've got to consider the hierarchy. Scale everything according to importance. Why is the word 'kills' (assuming you haven't already removed it) so much bigger than everything else? It feels like the stuff I want to see like the health bars are super tiny. And all the info I wouldn't care about like score and kills are large.

Then make sure everything lines up nicely. I want to scan it in one or two passes without my eyes jumping up and down over all the different margins and text sizes.

[bdsowers]

Here are my thoughts:
- I'd second the suggestion to remove the health bars. It's understood in SHMUPS that enemies sometimes take multiple hits. Players don't need the bars, and they add so much clutter.
- What are all these little icons/numbers around the Level/XP plates? Are these necessary? Could they just be shown at the end of a run instead of always?
- The harsh black outlines around all your text are not visually appealing. Consider a drop-shadow or something more subtle.
- Remove the 'Wave' counter from the constant UI and just show it centrally at the beginning of each wave.
- "Kills" doesn't need to be so big or central, even if the goal of the game is getting the most kills before death.
- Is keeping track of "Kills" even valuable when you're keeping track of "Score"?
- I have no clue what the little yellow... pill in the top left is for.

It's certainly not the worst UI I've ever seen (or shipped a game with  ), but it's a little visually noisy.