At the beginning of development, we decided that an HUD would be required to help the player with stealth encounter. We were not sure what information should this HUD give and how should it represent it. So I was the one tasked with designing this HUD and prototyping it.
Investigation
The first thing I did was to investigate other similar games to learn what kind of HUD where used. All the games I found fell into two categories:
- Stealth orientes games: These are games where stealth is a key mechanic and the player required a lot of detailed information. Examples are Dishonored and A Plague Tale.
- Horror oriented games: These games rely more on the horror aspects than in their stealth mechanics. In this case, they don’t really use any kind of HUD and give no visual information to the player. Examples are Outlast and Amnesia.
The conlcusion that I came to was that games choose with is more important for them: giving the player tools to overcome dificult encounters or let the player feel inmerse and struggle with relativly easy encounters. This decision would define our HUD, between a very detailed and invasive one, to a none existen one.
First decision
After a reunion with the design team, we decided that Maskerade was before anything a horror game. So we would preorize the inmersion of the player, reducing the information given during encounters and making the player struggle with simple encounters.
However, we were afraid that sound clues would not be enough to help the player understand the enemies behaviour. So we also decided that I would try to find an HUD that gived little visual information to the player and were as intradiegetic as possible.
The prototype
The HUD I prototyped would give the following information to the player:
- Orientation: Depending on the position of a shader on the edges of the screen.
- Distance: This shader was small and wide when an enemy detected the player form far away, and tall and thin if the enemy was close.
- Awarness: The shaders was almost translucent when an enemy started detecting the player, and very visible with an intense red color when an enemy was chasing the player.
These are some schemes that represent the HUD behaviour:
The final decision
Thanks to some testing, we found out that not only the players did not understand quite well the HUD’s information, but that they didn’t needed it to overcome the encounters. The HUD was actually distracting and confusing the players from the enemies actions.
For this reason we decided to commit to being a horror oriented game and not giving any visual information to the player about the enemies awarness. In the end, the idea of a stealth HUD was discarded and my prototype helped us better understand the player’s behaviour during encounters and what we wanted them to feel and understand.
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