How you show damage differs dramatically, it turns out, if you’re displaying it on the galvanized steel of a giant battle mech or a starship instead of the fragile flesh of the human body.
To get a closer look at how developers use models as UI we reached out to three studios working on very different games, with very different protagonists, and very different needs in terms of communicating information to the player in a way that feels unobtrusive and intuitive. These days, character models serve as a kind of sophisticated UI of their own, and conveying complicated systems like stamina or damaged systems to players without the use of big garish red bars or dry percentages is an art unto itself.
