"With these eyes, I can finally see the night."
I wanted to give a quick update as we near the release of some Coven playables, so I thought I would share some of the HUD developments I have made. Check out where it was just a bit ago. Yuck. However, you can see some of the scoreboard developments. You will definitely notice that even with this more polished version, artwork (abilities) and better artwork (status effects) are still needed. If you feel like you can offer assistance in development of some unique and stylized 2D artwork, please drop by the forums and lend a hand!
Minimap (Center)
Holding the minimap key will bring up a map displaying a graphical location of the capture points and active objectives on the current map, and which team controls them, if any. I will probably remove the score display at the bottom now that it is redundant with the team score indicator above.
Team Score Indicator (Top Center)
Absolutely what you think it is, the team score indicator displays how close each team is to reaching the score limit, and gives a visual indication of how many control points both teams currently control.
Level/Experience Indicator (Bottom Left)
The new vision of Coven involves gaining levels to unlock abilities via killing the opposing team and capturing and holding control points. The level indicator displays your current level and your progress towards the next level.
Energy Indicator (Bottom Left)
Active abilities generally incur a cooldown and have an energy cost to use or maintain the effect. Energy regenerates over time to a maximum value and at a rate determined by the current class.
Status Effects (Bottom)
Various effects afflicting the player will be displayed here along with effect magnitudes and duration timers. In this example, the shield represents that the player is in range of a capture point, and the star represents the player has one unspent ability point. Most of these are place holder artwork that needs updating and upgrading!
Abilities (Bottom Center)
Abilities are gained via acquiring experience points. Each class has 4 abilities and each ability has 3 ranks. Ranks follow what I will call "standard leveling logic" meaning abilities 1-3 require level 3 and 5 for ranks 2 and 3 respectively and the "ultimate ability" requires levels 6, 8, and 10 for ranks 1, 2, and 3 respectively (think DOTA). Abilities are used using (default) keys 1-4. Some abilities are passive, requiring no interaction for them to work (Sneak in the above example causes the player to go invisible when not moving). Most abilities have an energy cost and a cooldown, and the cooldown is displayed here. Obviously this interface could use some artwork!
I played the Alpha(?) with some of the devs some years ago, really great to hear that theres a beta on the way