Making a stylish return, its the Monster Friends Combat UI (now in Version 7)! I can't WAIT to start using this in an actual battle! NEW CHANGES: + Text boxes are bigger. Now I can fit more dialogue! + Redid the Skills and Items menu! + Mopsy (spider girl) is now a part of the party, replacing Fuku! + HIDDEN: I have started using guidelines! This should make my work faster and easier :> P.S. That beautiful Sans sprite comes from a fellow named Chip Potato. If they have a Tumblr, I shall try and link it here!
Hand of Fate is a very special game. It’s a role play card game with 3d combat system. You can build your deck like in Hearthstone, and go to the dungeon to fight with enemies like in World of Warcraft. The visual style of their card design is great. The UI design for most part are clear and stylish too. However, the attribute UI in combat, is bad. Some UI designers put cool art style over friendly user experience when work in a very stylish game, and this is a great example.
For most of time in this game, you are playing cards with the npc. Every card is an encounter which might give you good stuffs or bad stuffs that will affect your combat game play. The basic stats are Health, Food and Gold. Every time you encounter a card, you lose 1 food. Some of encounter cards are ‘stores’. You can spend your gold to buy new equipment or artifact cards. The other informations in attribute: weapon, shield, bless (buff), curse (debuff), artifact. These all look pretty cool. The informations are clear. Even when you have a lot of cards, it won’t block major information since the main interactions in the phase are focus on the middle of the screen
However, they did the same thing in combat, and that’s horrible. There is a card for every bless or curse you get; there is a card for every weapon, shield, artifact and other items you equipped. That’s a lot of cards. When your cards are many enough, they will go out the screen. But the bigger issue here is that those cards are masks. They almost blocked the left corner and the right corner entirely. Therefore you can’t see the traps or enemies in the two corners, and that’s bad, especially for a 3d realtime dungeon combat system.
How to fix it
First, I still want to keep the card visual style in UI, since it’s the main feature of the game, and it looks good. Second, I want to minimize the information area so player can get more informations from the 3d world. Also, it gives the space for develop team to add more combat features since they should no longer be worried about that cards will go out of the screen. Also, the size of every card is the same, I want to change it a little bit to show the difference between primary and secondary informations.
In the new UI, bless and curse are now shown as icon. It gives more spaces for both information feedback and more features; Health now in a smaller card, and Food and Gold will no longer be shown in combat; There is a size difference between active equipments and inactive equipments so player now can distinguish primary and secondary informations.
