Week 4 8/2-8/8

In this week, my agenda is creating the HUD(head-up display) for our game. This was one of my hardest task so far. There were three things I had keep in mind when creating the HUD. They are: space, theme, and most importantly, originality. Below show the FOV(field of view), for our game.

My first step when making the HUD is creating an outline of what the HUD will be like. I created my outline in Photoshop. I had to keep mind my space and originality of the HUD. It was all about trials and error, so all I did was just create many images that I feel are neat that would fit together and a good amount of distances apart. Below show my outline I created.

This outline I felt decent. The spaces between the UI(user-interface) wasn't bad neither the amount of UI on the screen.This HUD would also fit a third person view. My next step would be improving this outline. I like the color blue and all, but I feel like it is too commonly use in games. I decided to change the theme color to black, and while at it, I added an SP bar because our group plan for the future would be allowing our character to use skill.

 I thought I would be done after this change from above, but when I import this HUD into UDK(Unreal Development Kit).as a test run, I saw the transparency with the bottom right hand UI was giving me some trouble. This area I intend to use to show the weapon and money. The problem with this UI area is the fact that black the shadow from the light does not fit well or rather, fit too well.I like the color theme being black so I decided to keep it black while giving some adjustment to this area. I manage to think of a new trick.

Having the weapon icon a plain color to show which weapon my character is using is a common trick with most game when weapon UI, and the color white also fit well with my black color theme. With this I am done with my outline of the HUD, or so I thought...

Image A

Image B

 When I show my group the HUD outline with the black theme color my group think it was good, however, they feel like rather than being black it should have a more wood texture style to match our Wild West theme. I then change my HUD from before to the HUD shown in Image A. I felt it was better to have kept the theme color black but it was me against three other member. In the end, I settle it with just combining both trait of the HUD together and it turn out as appear in Image B. I finish this outline off by adding text and cross hair.