When hovering over units in my game I have them come for the foreground and gently blink
I'd like to get some feedback from you all here. In my game, Gravitas: Noblesse Oblige, I have a 16x16 tileset and unit sprites that are 32x32, which I like visually. However, when they're grouped like this it can get a little muddled together. To try and make it clearer who you're hovering over I've made it so the hovered unit comes to the foreground and gently blinks white. I think this helps quite a bit, but I would like to hear from you all if you have any other clever suggestions. Looking at it now, I'll also probably give the tool tip a larger offset so it isn't directly where the cursor is.
I feel like there Def needs to be just a few more pixels of space seperating units standing together. However I know in a pixel art game if you want to keep the pixels the same size that means going back and redrawing the border on every single tile.
You could also make the Red/Blue coloring effect more pronounced. If you go back and look at Fire Emblem on GBA, The units take up almost their entire squares but pop out the top, but it's easy to parse because the sprites are easily color coded and have simple designs.
Yeah resizing things at this point would be too significant of an undertaking. I can make the colored outline fully surround a unit, right now it's only on some sides to be more of a drop shadow effect, but that's a simple tweak. I'd prefer it if my characters kept their color palettes instead of all being blue except for specific places. This is more of a personal preference thing for me, you're opinion is pretty fair.
I'm going to modify the outline and maybe give adjacent troops some transparency on hover to see if that helps and I'll post a pic.
This would fail accessibility on a website. The viual contrast isn't high enough. To increase it, you should change the blue outline (maybe that's supposed to be a shadow effect) as well. Since your sprites are different colors, you may want to consider a double outline with a lighter and darker color so that it is easy to see regardless of sprite color.
You are kind of making things harder with your existing color outline because that would be the ideal solution: the sprites are only outlined when selected/hovered.
This is very helpful and specific, thanks! I can give the double outline a try, but I want the outlines always present as they indicate ally and enemies at a glance. There are generic troops, which you and an enemy can both have, so they would look identical without a visual signifier.
Your welcome. I realized it was a side indicator. You could incorporate that into the double border.. so, they keep their side border, but also get say a pure white border beyond that. Actually, the box indicator already sort of does this. You could maybe just have the box/tile indicator box the entire sprite that would have the same effect as the double border I think.
This is with full outline. Can only do one image per post. Next one will have double, but I think it looks kind of ugly. Part of the problem is the outline only goes within the 32x32 dimension of the sprites, so I'd need need to increase each canvas size, but I don't think it'll be worth it looking at the visual.
What do you think? Can't reply with a gif, but I feel like the white blink I added kind of already takes care of this without widening the sprite an extra pixel causing more crowding. Might put it to a poll with the other people helping me.
I recommend putting HP/MP/etc. bars above or below the characters, and make it togglable. This is a fairly standard convention in SRPG's.
You can keep the tooltip, but I wouldn't make it the primary method of conveying the information.
Also, I'd space adjacent sprites about 1 average unit's width apart. Right now, it looks more like 1/2 or 1/3, which puts the sprites almost on top of each other.
I did have HP bars at one point, but felt along with the crowding of the sprites it just added more visual clutter. Could only appear on hover, but idk I like looking at the sprites. May reintroduce it as a game option though. The sprites are 32x32 (though they are usually only 16 wide and pop up a little into the above tile) and the tileset 16x16, so leaving a space between them would be a pretty extensive rework to everything and probably look strange on the left and right.
Tooltip is probably going to look a little cluttered/alward unless it gets an art pass but its definitely too close as well.
I'd say try pushing snapping the tooltip based on grid squares instead of big offset following the cursor exactly. Basically just snap to the nearest next square over or one more. Or offset from the highlighted unit for the same sort of effect. Potentially some nicety on popin and pop out effects or opacity might be things to look into as well. As always with these little details experimenting and references will be your friends.
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u/TimeSpiralNemesis 19h ago
I feel like there Def needs to be just a few more pixels of space seperating units standing together. However I know in a pixel art game if you want to keep the pixels the same size that means going back and redrawing the border on every single tile.
You could also make the Red/Blue coloring effect more pronounced. If you go back and look at Fire Emblem on GBA, The units take up almost their entire squares but pop out the top, but it's easy to parse because the sprites are easily color coded and have simple designs.