Dangerous Heights
Dangerous Heights
Dangerous Heights
Anton Palmer
Aspiring Game- & UI designer
Creating a new HUD for AQ3D
This was a school assignment where we were to redo the HUD of a game to make it 'better' (more easily readable, more intuitive etc.). I chose the game Adventure quest 3D, as it is a simple and relatively generic MMORPG, which allowed me to start with something very basic and then try to create another experience just by changing the HUD.
Original HUD
In AQ3D, you find all of your HUD-related information (Health, mana, abilities, items, level, rank & more) at the bottom of the screen, which almost allows the player to play the game by only looking at this area and not the actual game. I wanted to try to separate these items and have them be read in another way to give the player move reason to look around the screen more.
My recreation of the HUD
Here, I have split up the UI-elements more over the entire screen, forcing the player to be active and look around while playing the game. For example, the player's abilities are now on her back instead, which gives the player reason to keep track of the middle of the screen, and the enemy's health is below him, instead of as a more typical MMORPG icon at the top.
Different types of HUD
I also used the different types of HUD (spatial, diegetic, non-diegetic & meta) to increase the immersion of the game, instead of filling an area with a lot of non-diegetic HUD- elements as the original does. An example of these additions is the Meta-HUD that flashes in red with spikes on your screen when you are low on health, increasing the feeling of danger to the situation. Another example is the 'Spirit moglin' (a moglin is a creature from the game) as a spatial HUD. The 'Spirit moglin' helps you find your way to your quest if you are lost long enough, by appearing within your vision range and then starting to move towards the quest area.