Off With Their HUDs!

I'm designing a HUD among other things for certain FPS/3rdP game but after few PhotoShop sketches and reference games I wanted more ideas and come across this brilliant piece of text:

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060203/wilson_01.shtml

"Off With Their HUDs!: Rethinking the Heads-Up Display in Console Game Design"

It opened my eyes quite a bit and now I'd like to get your insight for this matter too; what makes a good & functional HUD?

GUI, like "settings screens" are totally another thing - I'm looking ideas and input for actual game-time HUD.

Big? Bright? Minimal? None at all? Hidden in the game objects? Electrostatic brain stimulator? So many choices...

Just off the top of my head...

-Shouldn't obscure too much of the action, if possible.
-Doesn't guide your eyes away from the action either.
-Should look nice, but not at the expense of being unclear( as in to what every icon/gadget is there for )

my $0.02:

- low opacity
- small as possible
- only essential info

but NOT:

- NO Hud.

If you want no HUD, just leave your computer and have a look around ;-)

Few more links about HUDs VS No-HUD/Minimal-HUD:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/archives/2006/02/06/game_over_for_huds.html

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,70387-0.html

Riddick had a nice minimalist HUD for an FPS, often having no hud at all unless you are getting hit, and often using subtle aural and visual queues to pass certain info. It worked really well and helped immerse the player in the world.

Was one of the most immersive FPS games I have played since your body is still rendered and casts dynamc shadows from all lights in the first person. So your not just a camera with a gun attached like 99% of fps games.

Toggle-able on and off. That's how I'm doing mine. the only way to please everybody!

Actually, removing a HUD doesn't always give you more realism and immersion - in the case of a health bar, how else will you tell what your physical condition is? In real life this is conveyed by the feeling of pain, and I don't think anyone will ever extend virtual reality this far. So unless you're wearing a belt that inserts needles into your side to represent your health level, I think a health bar is still an important part of any realistic game (unlike something like COD2 where the player magically "heals" in a few seconds from serious bullet wounds).

Now, of course, HDTV screen burn is an important issue, but totally unrelated to realism.

This is a BAD PUN! Bad bad bad bad bad!!!

I agreee with John J there... a hud lets you know things you should know as if you were indeed in the game. A good HUD in unobtrusive and informative and looks good to boot!

Regarding HUDs, there is a cool HL2 mod in development (nearing public release of some sort, it seems) called Insurgency. It looks a lot like a conventional FPS such as BF2, but they are really rethinking a lot of conventions. For example, they do have an aim to completely kill the HUD and it sounds like it's working fine.
A worthy experiment, in my opinion. As long as the fact that "you have been shot", or "you have been shot twice and it really hurts" is properly conveyed by hints that blend with the rest of the game world, it becomes not only manageable, but more immersive.


I don't see why people disliked COD2's health system. Realism-wise, it is of course absurd. However, there are four things that it does better than conventional health systems:

-With a conventional health system, you'll be finding med packs sitting about in all the quiet places anyway. These things are not realistic in the slightest, and beyond that they are boring. Healing oneself becomes a mindless reflex that feels out of place from the rest of the game. (That's because, in a game aiming to be realistic, an instant healing object is out of place).

-Otherwise, you will find yourself quicksaving around every corner. Prey tried to do away with this by simply having you resurrected whenever you die (and it did not work very well, considering how it made the final boss completely uninteresting).
A health system like that of COD2, where you can restore full health in a tough situation without quickloading, does away with it in a very tidy and completely transparent manner. If you do something stupid, you can still escape (which is exciting, if the AI is good); after doing that, you can hide and try again all in the same instance of gameplay. No load screens, no function keys, no "I'd better save!". It's clean!

-With the 'healing everywhere' style of health system, there is more focus on strategy / wits, and less focus on hoarding weapons and ammunition. No player can just pop out of a hole in the ground and start blasting everything; it becomes obvious rather quickly that this is a stupid thing to do, and instead you will focus on the importance of cover to not die. People not only actually pay more attention to cover, but they stay closer to it. Running through an open field is a scary task where your character's safety is challenged by the fact that he has no cover, rather than the fact that "he only has 37 health!"

-Lastly, health systems like that of COD2 actually encourage more realistic health meters. Your character can't take much before he's killed, and this is made acceptable by the fact that there is no health bar to say "WTF, that took 99 health?!".
Bullets and especially explosions in COD2 are more powerful than in most games, because the player's health isn't 10 times that of Superman in order to make it playable.


It really depends on the game, but with anything tactical I feel that COD2's way is great. Even if it isn't the best way possible, it is at least fresh; exploration is good, because this health bar thing is getting old.

For everything else, where an HUD is really necessary, I'd say HL2's HUD is one of the best; just stick the info at the bottom of the screen in a minimalist way and don't surround it with useless pictures.
On the other hand, Battlefield 2's is one of the most cluttery HUDs, filled with all matter of unimportant information and with a chat window that doesn't work because it is spammed by death messages.

pain can be done by subtle use of colour distortion and aural heart beat type sounds.

In Riddick you have a slighth reddish filter and the health bar fades in when your in a stressful combat situation and are getting hurt.

It's really obvious when you are in pain, and there is no useless clutter on the screen.

There is no hud for stealthmode either, instead you crouch and your vision becomes slightly widerangle as well as a slight blue cast adjustment to the screen that gets darker the more invisible you are. (might sound weird getting darker as you are more hidden, but the screen also has its values hightened a little like subtle nightvision.

It all works really well, and its really cool to see your shadow sneaking around with you, see your knees and arms when doing Melee.

I wish there were more innovative FPS games that think about what they are doing with the way you interact and see the game, rather than just copying everything that went before. FPS has become pretty dull lately where COD, HL2, Prey, Doom, quake, unreal are all pretty much the same game.

Agree - that's why I don't want to do another tired carbon copy HUD used everywhere, even if it works to some extent. I also don't want to re-invent the wheel either because that becomes "too artsy" very fast. With some thinking I think I can make minimalistic HUD that is visible only when needed and shows the right info then and that only.

Not knowing EXACTLY what your health is or do you have 13 or 14 rounds left is irrelevant IMO. Maybe the last few rounds might be good to see so that you can time your reloading... but in real life you rarely know your ammo situation (yes, there are transparent clips etc but still).

I have not played Riddick yet but it seems that it's worth trying out for research purposes :)

I have to agree about riddick. There is nothing wrong with makeing new FPS or RTS or any established genres as long as you think about what you are doing... Don't do things just because they were done like that in every other game.

This is one of the things I wished that Oblivion did better. It seemed so obvious to me that if you died you should have gone to one of the realms of death and had to do things to return from death... or played the rest of the game dead... or returned as a ghost..

Any of a million things better than forcing me to save whenever things get tough-looking to prevent from having to load.

Although great, the way planescape: Torment did death wouldn't work in every game.

The gameplay comes first, and the game should be made to fit the gameplay. If your story is a cookie-cutter WW2 game, then you obviously don't care about breaking new groud anyway... but if you just want to make a 'great FPS' it is ok to rethink these things.. This is what was so great about Riddick. Not only that, but it never would have gone like it did if Vin hadn't sat over the design team telling them their ideas were stupid... I think it takes fresh eyes to see the correct path sometimes... we, as designers, should be asking people outside our field to look at games more often...

Here'sa couple of video's of riddick, if you watch the game a bit you can see the HUD and some of the effects that take place in different circumstances to tell you whats up.

This game still looks and plays well after 2 years, and mixes elements of FPS, RPG, Adventure and fighting.


Beginning of the game,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES-4kbVCZt8

Melee combat

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiqWyzkfrc0


Shooting shooting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yMG8kSwrQ0

I think having a hud is another `inherited` un-questioned copycat feature often added without being thought out. Like many have said, the game world itself should convey what you need to know, do you really need to separate-out a layer of information floating on top of the screen making it not look like a real environment but instead an environment hidden behind a panel? That said some types of games you must have the hud, such as a radar. HUD's usually seem to be about `technology` and ways of getting information that can't be transferred visually, but then, building in say an infra-red vision thing in the real view of the game world would be more `wysiwyg` than a little map in the corner. I think maybe there just wasn't enough technological advancement before or CPU/GPU power to be able to directly represent status in the game world itself, requiring small and easily rendered floating stuff.

Riddick Rocks, I totally recommend the game to everyone (unless you don't like violence)