Health bars

[IanWitham]

Not the kind made from crunchy oats and honey.

Small bar above the rogue and above monsters indicating how many hit points they have left. Bar could change from green to orange to red as creature suffers more harm. Creatures on full health should not show their health bar.

What do you think? One of the design decisions you need to make for a rogue-like is exactly how much user feedback is given for this sort of thing. At one extreme would be no feedback at all (the current situation), at the other extreme is showing the exact hit points remaining for each creature as a number (not very realistic). A little health bar is a good compromise, but I have played rogue-likes where there is simply a message given during combat such as "The slime is mildly bruised; The slime looks hurt; The slime looks close to death"

[kcunning]

That was exactly what I had in mind, when I first thought about levels. I feel like there should always be something that you can grind on a bit, and something you should be fleeing from.

I may add a healthbar as well, though I've also considered changing the monster blit. It might be more effort to do that than it's worth, though. :\

[kcunning]

And the above comment only made HALF sense, because in my head, I was combining this with a comment on another ticket.

ARGH long day.

[IanWitham]

What do you think of a method to dynamically add wounds to a "healthy" sprite? That would save creating multiple images for each monster!

[kcunning]

Possible, though that might bring issues for my non-meaty sprites (like Derpy Goo). A health-bar might be the cheapest option.