I'm trying to give my little game a more appealing and readable HUD than the current one. It's a DS homebrew game, and I gave myself the whole "bottom screen" for stats & score. The text in white will be code-generated and offers little artistic liberty, but I thought the "health bar" and the "punch bar" could be worth a more visual interpretation : the blue curves.
The intent is to lit on/off part of these curves (palette-wise) to reflect the current status of the hero.
I'm not yet satisfied with the double-size Bilou (blue hero) and Applemen on the lower half, though.
Any hint ?
This looks very refined already. And it's definitely appealing to the eye.
As for possible improvements on the lower screen:
The background looks like it has some copy paste errors. (I see six or so straight line cut offs for the leaf clusters.)
...On that note, there seems to be a black square corner behind the apple. It kind of overpowers and detracts from the apple's subtle mouth.
Also, The leaf/stem of the apple seems to be lost in the background atm. It helps that it already has a different hue than the blue forest tint behind them but maybe you could create in inner semitransparent box that overlays the background enough to push them forward.
Here's a quick photoshop example.
It might add linearity and structure to what looks very organic and irregularity already while cuing to the player that the screen is of lesser importance. Not that the text was hard to read before, but this doesn't hurt.
The health bar seems very reminiscent of a jump bar right now. I'm not sure if I'm the only one reading it this way though.
...The classic direction for the health bar to drain is right to left, but in this case, that would disconnect you character for your remaining health.
Perhaps you could try pushing the blue guy to the left of the bar and maybe altering the bar's shape a little.
Of course, this wouldn't be a problem for people who who have played the game before, but it might be counter intuitive for people just picking it up.
Just my two cents... Hope this helps!
