HP bars for the game

General
1

When you fight an enemy or another person one of the most important things is that you can see its HP bar (in most games atleast) i will try to put up some different types of HP bars and we can talk about which type suits the best, im sure that oort will come up with something cool but never the less :smile:

The Bar System (classic systdem)

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the classic and mostly used HP bar is the one above people heads, usually shown with stribes to give a general sense of how much health the individual has, in most cases it is 1 stripe per 100 hp or 1 stripe per thousand HP. this can have quite a bit of designs but it will always share the fact that it is a bar and float above the person.

another example where it is under the enemy, mostly used in 2d games

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Hud Bar.

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This is also generally used alot, the HP bar is not above or near the enemy in the general sense, but you see the enemy’s lifebar in the HUD.

this one i think would not fit oort very well because it is fluid combat rather than tab target combat, but one thing i find cool about this and that havent been done in most games is that the bar is circle formed. would be pretty cool to play around with having the enemies lifebar represented by a circle above their head.

Circle HP bar:

This is something that is done in the game Triad Wars, sadly i cannot find a picture of it, the idea is that under the feet of the enemy there is a red half circle which shows its health, and when you damage the enemy it goes down, looks really cool and is a nice alternative.

No HP Bar:

In Kingdom Hearts (an amazing game series) your ability to view the enemies HP bar is a skill you have to equip. which uses points, but before you do that you cannot see the enemy’s healthbar, you would honestly just keep hitting it until it died.

Correct me if im wrong but in the earlier stages if not still of vanilla minecraft there was no enemy HP bars involved either? that would basically work the same way as this, hit them until they die.

Something i would like to point out with having no HP bar is that it is insanely demotivating that you cannot see how much damage you have dealt, you always feel like you dont really do anything until the enemy suddenly dies.

So as you can see, HP bars is a thing that people just take for granted and use a standard formula for every single game, i think this is one of the places where oort could do it differently and shine, even though its a small thing, its still something that nobody else does.

@james this is just my theory on something that would make the game more unique as you guys try to go for :smiley:

1 Like
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I would like to have a bar which shows hp and shield (if there is one) in one bar (either the shield covering the hp until it is gone or just as a bar right to the hp (For example: if the creature has 100hp and 50 shield it would look like “|===HP===|–SH–|”))

Even if there is a energy bar next to it, the bars should be very simple and easy to understand. If they are to colorful or to “much” it may be annoying. I hope that there is also a function just to show the bars of the focused enemy :wink:

3

I will prefer no HP bars, that will make the game look strange.
Really we don’t need that, we don’t need to know how hard and how much damange we do, that will remove the dificulty, you are thinking like if this was some sort of WoW in wich the equipment character lvl, and skills lvl will define who wins… With no skill just pressing numbers for theu se of skills.

This will be skill combat based game not a Simple RPG with hotkeys sor using special attacks.
I will like if we have skills and special attacks, and the equipment will be really importan, but you can fight with a bad equipment an win (it will require a LOT of skill and a LOT more of time in some cases) but really.

Yes you have a good equipment, and you may be able to one hit kill a new character, but that doesn’t mean he wont be able to do you damange??

Or do you need me to repost your image about SAO??

Zouls you are trying yo make Oort online in A copy of mmorpg like WoW and that kind of things :confused:

4

Not at all. im trying to point out the RPG elements in games 1 by 1 and try to look at different possiblities, also i dont disagree with you when you say

if you have noticed by looking around, i absolutely DESPISE wow’s system like the pest, and i apologize that you got that view of me but let explain my game preference simply, which is close to yours, but it appears we both got off at the wrong start and misundestood eachother.

i play mobas, one of the most team and skillbased games i know (other than FPS like CS ofc) and i also prefer action combat system games, i do not want a wow ‘‘click the target and you cannot dodge anything’’ but more like wildstars ‘‘anything have a telegraph that can be dodged’’ but they will attack so fast that you cannot just dodge every single attack, you wont be able to dodge a pigs standard attack, but you will be able to dodge all of the skills it use which deals real damage, same with this, you will be able to dodge SKILLS, from creatures, but not the standard attack as a way to not make yourself virtually invincible.

this sentence is also insanely contradicting though

you dont want skills and special abilities, but instead skill and special abilities? that is seriously contradicting.

so in short, no wow where you cannot dodge anything, but not a system that renders melee completely useless anyways because a person can dodge even the simplest standard attacks.

5

I’d prefere a system similar to Monster Hunter. You wouldn’t see the HP of the monster but the bigger ones would look different after they took some beating. You could damage their claws, horns, teeth and even cut of tails.
You never knew if you were close to beat it and therefor you were always on guard and the victory was so much more rewarding.

And as said before the HP bar does destroy the immersion to some degree.

5 Likes
6

Thats a good argument, so no hp bar in the general sense but some sort of visuel ques on how much damage the enemy player / creature have taken? its a good thought, but wont that mean that for every creature they need to do something like 4 character drawings of the same.

if we take the pig as an example we would need.

Clean and healthy pig
Pig iwht small cutmarks
Pig with more cut marks
Dead pig that is slashed to pieces.

that seems pretty violent, so can you enlighten me in a way that would make your idea possible, give enough visuel ques to what is happening and still be child friendly?

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Yea child friendlyness… Honestly I don’t know^^
Maybe you could turn some things off in the options on the cost of not being able to tell if you do damage or not.
Maybe you could trust your children more in terms of differentiating the digital and real world. (and trusting in your upbringing because there mostly lies the problem)
We could also just use the system of KH where a skill would enable to see the marks or just a simple bar.

About the workload. Yes you’d need more textures but you could build up on the healthy pig and just add the cut marks. And the markings would only make sense for bigger and tougher enemys like titans or protectors.

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Yeah i know its a bad argument ‘‘It has to be playable for children!’’ which i dont think should be used in terms of difficulty of the game, but in things like gore and blood i think its relevant, i personally dont feel like oort fits the theme of having neither blood nor gore.

I am just discussing here, the No HP bar could work, but as i said it feels like you dont really do much difference, now i think in terms of harder enemies or even PVP battles, i would be really sad if i had to fight an enemy and not have a clue on how much hp he has xD

so your suggestion is having either an option or a skill that shows the HP bar, so people who dont want to see it aren’t force to see neither a bar nor a Portrait with info, to make it more immersive/hardcore?

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Either that or the cutmarks without blood and gore. Monster Hunter never had blood in the EU versions and it still worked out for me.

But I agree Oort really doesn’t have the setting for realistic blood and gore (maybe not even for unrealistic).

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Since Oort Online is to be an MMORPG, I don’t think that the Kingdom Hearts thing would work since knowing your enemies’ health is crucial in this genre. Even if it is an achievable skill, the beginning stages would be quite challenging, considering the theoretical “gameplay loop”.

One system that I liked was TES IV: Oblivion’s system where an enemy’s health bar would half circle around your crosshair, and would change its level according to who you’re looking at. Skyrim modified this by changing it to the top area of the screen, under the compass. I believe either of these systems would work for Oort Online, but would all depend on whether in the future a centralized UI/HUD becomes more useful for the gameplay.

1 Like
11

Rather than a health bar appearing above enemies, I’d be interested in monsters showing weakness as they reach their limit like Sif the wolf in Dark Souls. Of course they showed a health bar, but you could clearly see a wounded animal.

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again, was pointed out, and then back to the fact that although awesome, it would mean that they needed to make several unique forms of each creature depending on the damage-

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Immersion is more attractive to me rather than knowing who’s winning. You are right about it being more work, but some goals are worthy.

2 Likes
14

then the ability to turn HP bars off completely would be fine right?

15

I think it would fit the theme for creatures to have a kind of “core” that was visible, and you could tell their status from that. It would have a center color that shows several effects such as:
Changing slowly from green (full health) to red (low health)
flashing when it receives a critical hit/stun/debuff
could be used in more interesting death animations, such as the core shatters and the monster fades away

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That would actually be a really really good idea for the character designs of the protectors.

@ben @james what do you say to that?

but that still doesnt cover animals and players

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That’s an interesting idea, but we aren’t fighting robots and an animal with a hole in it big enough to see this core is probably really dead.

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Animals could have something similar, such as the tint of their coloring, or maybe even their eye color.

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that would be too overkill and too small.

so no.

20

would be pretty cool to implement something like this, also the protectors doesnt seem like somebody who would care about having a core xD