Cool ways to display information--such as mana and health--to the player without an HUD?

The only game I know that tells the player the information he needs without using a HUD is DeadSpace: your lifebar is built into your suit (the amount of fluid left in the spinal column of the suit is your health) and the weapon's ammo is displayed through a hologram projected by the gun.

 

My personal fav is Journey, by Jenova Chen. The length of the scarf indicates your health bar, and if it gets long enough, your outfit gets a white glow.



Gigi

 

Jurassic Park: Trespasser indicated health via a heart tattoo on your chest, which you could see when looking down.

I am surprised you don't know of this; it is widely-regarded as the best game of all time.

 

Seems interesting but also like it would be inconvenient having to look down to see your health.

 

The problem with a lot of these examples are that they are simple. At most you only have to track health with a discrete health bar, but otherwise you don't have anything else to pay attention to.

I suppose that was one of the nicer things about hardcore mode in CoD. Hell, you were actually forced to count your ammo.

 

True. In DeadSpace though, they also display your ammo. Do you know any games?

The reason I made this thread is because I wanted to get ideas on how to display Health and Mana to the player without health bars, but they are multiple classes in my game.
Since everyone in my game is a spellcaster, I thought I'd have a blue glow around their wand/staff that weakens as the player spends mana but it seems like it wouldn't be so great, and how would I display health...

 

You could definitely do that and have intensity be amount, or have halos around the head of the staff being solid fractions of mana. Maybe have the glow shift in color for health. There is never an easy answer for this, when it's highly dependent on players clocking in to what is usually ignore-able details.

 

having a kind of firefly blue for mana red for health, they have a glow emitter, moving into a range from 0 to 1 depending on the vitals level.

 

Dead Space had a fair bit more than that, it was just designed such that you didn't have to track it in your HUD. I actually think they did a great job of that.

For instance, your weapons were all moddable. The interface for that was at the mod stations, though, as if you were using the mod station, rather than some abstract menus getting between you and the game world. Compare that to weapon modding in Crysis.

It seems simpler than other similar games because it was designed so well that the complexity that was there became completely intuitive, to the degree that it wasn't even noticed.

 

How about if your character is glowing blue if his manager level is high and it becomes more and more faint when mana level falls.

 

I think this is really dependent on the game's view (first person, third person, top down, etc...).

But some things that others have done are using red around the edges of the screen to show damage (like in GoW), but that seems to work best with games that have "Halo Health".

Then you could use audio cues to indicate fatigue, like in Farcry 3; there was never a "Stamina Bar" but you certainly had a limited stamina and could tell from his panting.

For Mana you could do similar screen effects.

Or maybe as you cast a spell you have a glow that deminishes as you use it.

For games that are third person you could always show that your player is hurt through their animations. One of my favorite games of all time, Bushido Blade, did that:


No life bars. But you'd gimp body parts as you fought and could die in one hit.

I wouldn't mind seeing that mechanic again.

But even if you still want life bars you could transition between animations based on how much life you have left. So if you're full you are walking around fine, but as you take damage you start to hobble and keel over.

 

Yea animations seem like a good idea but I want the player to be able to somewhat accurately determine how much mana / health his character has left. I don't know if animations could convey such information.

The blue glow around the wand / staff is one idea though.

@Damien Delmarle 's idea seems like a good idea. I hadn't thought about having a trailing character. I'll explore it further. Thanks!

 

Well that's the trade off. You lose accuracy, but you gain engagement and suspense.

 

Going all the way back to Doom, your portrait got increasingly bruised and bloodied as you lost health.

More subtly, though, sometimes in third-person games your character will turn its heads toward an object of interest. The level designer doesn't have to bathe it in a glow effect, spawn a particle effect, or flash a big HUD arrow over it. We're sensitive enough to body language that we innately pick up on the subtle cue.

Not to get sidetracked from the stats-reporting that most of you are discussing, but are there other interesting ways information like this can be conveyed in-game?

 

What do you mean by that?

 

Character stats (health, mana, ammo, etc.) are probably the best candidates to display in-game without a HUD, such as the scarf in Journey and the bodysuit in Dead Space. But other things also traditionally use out-of-game-world UI elements -- for example, a glowing highlight around the NPC you've moused over in an RPG, or a projection icon under its feet when you've selected the NPC. These are so common that it's hard to imagine not using them. But someone might have said the same about the traditional healthbar HUD prior to Dead Space.

 

I think it has to do with how abstract the data being represented is, and how it would relate to a real-world interaction.

Health, as it relates to "how much pain am I in" or "how damaged is this thing" is a very practical metric - simplified, sure, but still directly useful. "My armor's integrity is at 15%" is something relatively straightforward to display as a part of that armor in a variety of ways - a readout a-la Dead Space, batters and dents, status lights, rips and tears, bits hanging off. You know, whatever we could observe in the real world to figure out that information for ourselves. "Sheesh, my armor is full of holes, it's probably less useful now."

Ammo is the same. "I have 4 shots left" or "I have 3 magazines after this one".

These are things represented by real world direct observations. They are tangible things we're observing a physical property of. We only ever stuck them in a HUD in the first place for convenience (or out of habit from our table top war games).

Those bits of data have two important properties:
1. They are properties of physical things. This makes them directly observable.
2. They are inherently tangible. (Though they may be simplified via abstraction for the sake of the computer.)

But "I have selected that guy"... What it means is "the next time I give a command, I intend it to apply to this guy".
It's not a property of that guy. It's a property of your next command. In contrast to the two properties above:
1. They are properties of ideas. They can be observed only via communication.
2. They are inherently abstract.

That's where the challenge comes from in representing them outside of an abstract HUD. They don't represent anything physical or tangible or any immediate change in the world. You can not observe their state by looking at a physical thing. They must be explicitly communicated.

On the topic of selection, though, Black and White was interesting in so far as selecting something did have an immediate physical impact - you picked it up. Select some wood? Rip it out of the ground. Select a person? Picks them up. Look in your hand to see what's currently "selected", ie: what you're carrying.

So... I think that to get rid of abstract HUDs we need to move towards having more inherently physical interactions in our game. That's what Dead Space did - they just removed any interaction that wasn't physical.

 

Morgan Freeman narrates the game in real time.

 

Have you heard of Bastion? I only played the demo a while ago but as far as I remember, they had a narrator narrate the story; "And the hero was killed by the boss", etc.

(No, it wasn't Morgan Freeman.)

 

Ever player Condemned 2? How do you check how much bullets are in the clip of your gun? YOu take out the clip and look at it.
Edit: Here's a video, run at 0:38

 

in modern combat 4 and a lot of android games I played screen gets more red when you are getting hitr and when you get hit too much you die. when you're not getting hit you regenrate and screen gets less red.

 

So as a gamer and many others will agree. For the game mentioned in this thread u can just make it be something like a spell. U use cues such as the blue intensity to tell the Mana and bruises + limping if the limp and bruise isn't to much of a struggle to tell the health and for the accuracy that u seek, like I said before u can use a spell. It's a simple button press that brings up a UI in game without pausing gameplay like a holographic screen which shows the stats in accuracy. U would animate the character doing something like a first clench or wand raising or whatev u use to summon spells but a quick version that makes the UI which is designed to look like a magic spell to appear. It would be aligned in front of the character like the character is looking at a computer screen. This would help not to break immersion. This is one of the best course of actions u can take.

 

I like what Escape from Tarkov does. They do different camera filters for various health states. The image is somewhat blurred when in pain, there is red around the edges when you're dying, when you take pain pills it gets this really grainy effect. If your leg is broken you walk slow and get further injured if you try to sprint.

To get specific health information for your various body parts you have to go to open a health menu, but you've got a pretty good idea what you're going to see before you even look.

 

I personally really like sound implementations. Like the sound of your gunfire pitching up as you approach the limit of your current clip. Or a heartbeat when stamina is low.