Designing a heads-up display

Designing a Heads-Up Display (HUD) is a very challenging task. The HUD is the interface through which your players can interact with the virtual world and receive feedback from the virtual world environment. As with everything else we have designed so far, the HUD design is also heavily related to the type and the needs of the game you are trying to make.

For instance, a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game will have a very different type of HUD design to a First-Person Shooter (FPS) or a Role-Playing Game (RPG). They will have some things in common, but their individual design is very distinctive, as well as some of the features and functionality.

We could have a whole book just about the design and development of user interfaces and how to approach them in a scientific manner. But that is outside the scope of this book, and we are concerned with the theories.

HUD basics

Any simple heads-up display will have, at a minimum, a way to display the following information:

• Basic...