Devlog 04: Giant Health Visualization (Patreon)

A common design challenge for VR games is how to best display the player's health. This challenge is doubly true in Davigo, as the Giant's health must be clearly conveyed to both the VR and the PC players.

Early designs for the VR player's health involved a health bar placed at the top of their, perpetually attached to the headset.

Health bars are excellent in that they are a tried and true design solution that takes minimal effort to get implemented—perfect for validating quick prototypes. Beyond that, they come with a few drawbacks for Davigo.

• Attaching a floating health bar to the peripherals of the headset can feel aggravating to the VR player, as it is always present if your field of view, even when you don't need the information.
• Health bars only give information about what percent of health you have remaining. This may be less useful than information like how many hits to do I have remaining or will the next hit kill me?

We had previously done some prototypes where huge chunks of the Giant's head blow off on impact, and thought this would make a neat—and satisfying for the Warrior!—way to display the Giant's health.

This came with a couple challenges. If the Giant had half health, would that mean half their head would simply be blown away, making their face totally unrecognizable? And how would health, a percentage between 0 and 100, be clearly conveyed via a broken head?

To the solve the first problem, we decided that only an outer shell would get destroyed as health was depleted, leaving behind something that resembles the Giant's face and silhouette. You can see our first pass on it below.

However, this still did not clearly answer the above questions—how much health do I have? A lot, a little? Will the next hit kill me? Impacts would blow away chunks of the head, but the amount of pieces remaining didn't necessarily correlate with the amount of health.

To solve this, we creating a system that would specify exactly how the destruction would take place. Instead of pieces blowing off arbitrarily, the Giant's head would be subdivided into three chunks, each taking a single hit to destroy (on default settings, anyways), with the fourth hit—contacting a totally unprotected Giant—being the killing blow.

The goal here being that the Giant's health can be quickly inferred in the same way one would read a pie chart, or health systems in games like Super Mario Galaxy.

Mario's health is split into three segments. Image from SupperMarioBroth.

Of course, up until now we're skipping an essential part—if the Giant's health is displayed on their face, how do they see their own health? Here, we made use of an existing mechanic to create a solution. For a few updates now, the Giant has had metal shields on the back of their hands that can block incoming projectiles. We came up with the idea that these shields could be reflective, allowing the Giant to inspect their reflection using the shields, and therefore determine their health.

This allows both the Giant and the Warrior to see the same visual representation of the Giant's health. As well, it ensures that the Giant's health is not distracting or in-view when the VR player is not looking to check it. As with any new feature, especially one as essential as health visualization, this is likely to undergo further revision to ensure it works well for everyone.

Roystan