Blood Bowl User Interfaces

[VoodooMike]

Reduced to Shades of grey = prone.

The problem with greyscale is that it gets in the way of using colour as an indicator for things like... which team a player is on. If you've got two teams of the same roster and they're using the same images for their various players, you need some way to know which team a given player is on. If you're putting the colour on something other than the player its no big deal, but if you're using team colours then greyscale hides that information.

There's also a possible problem with pieces that are, themselves, mostly shades of grey. Certainly its possible to ensure that no pieces are totally without colour, but things like metal tend to be grey-ish, and its not inconceivable that, given the opportunity, coaches would make some or all pieces be primarily shades of grey.

Reduced to Black silhouette = stunned.

I've actually been thinking that silhouette, either partial or full, would be a good combination with status icons so long as the piece's shape is distinct. Included an example of what I was thinking in the visual sample below.

No bases. You are working with limited real estate no matter how high your resolution, don't waste it on a base.

It all comes down to how much room you give yourself, but I do know what you mean. Limited visual real-estate is a major issue in general for BB, and is more of a concern when it comes to skill/stat icons.

Prone & Stunned, i like the / and X. I find it really easy to see and identify. If it were fading, you have problems. Sometimes with faded (moved) players on FUMBBL you can miss them more easily depending on weather and the pallette for the race.

You're probably used to the / and X from having played FUMBBL for years now.. It's something people can get used to but I didn't find it visually "obvious" enough... as in, a glance at the screen does not give an instant read on how many players are on the ground, or never did to me (I only played a few dozen games on FUMBBL, so maybe it gets more intuitive over time).

For moved, faded works fine, but as above, they can on occasion be a bit hard to see. I would almost like to see a ~70% fade (versus 50%) and another symbol, maybe an em dash.

In terms of transparency, I think FUMBBL's choice of default pitch image is a big part of the problem - it's a very grainy image, with dark and light pixels frequently next to one another. That conflicts with the small-scale pixel art on the player images when transparent. To demonstrate the difference I snagged a few images off google and put together this example:



The top row is orc linemen... the first is 100% opacity, the second is 50% opacity, the third is 70% opacity. I think that 70% is maybe too similar to 100% to be easily recognized, while 50% is still hard to miss. The key, though, is that the defining edges of the piece's image don't conflict with the pitch.

One thing you should consider, if you are doing tagging is allowing the user to set a background colour and opacity to the tagging text so it is more visible. FUMMBL works ok, but there are times when it is hard to read, depending on icon or the field.

I've found that using an outer stroke on text in a high contrast colour works out ok for visibility...eg, white text with a black outline. In general I find it's a good idea to do that for anything that needs to be distinct, with black outlining being a good default.