Color coding stats

Just looking for a little input to help figure out which colors will match with what so I can more easily design an interface for a game I’m making for work.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WXBGN6J

I answered. It would have been great to have color samples to choose from, but I’ve never set up a survey with surveymonkey and I don’t know if it could even handle it.

Comedy option: Let the players customize the colors they want in the display!

Originally posted by Ace_Blue:

I answered. It would have been great to have color samples to choose from, but I’ve never set up a survey with surveymonkey and I don’t know if it could even handle it.

Didn’t look for swatches, actually XD
Edit:
Not possible, at least, not with the free account. I might be able to rig something up using an image question, but I am not sure. :\

Can’t share the results directly (PRO only feature). So doing my best, here.

(The “other” colors were not that interesting, gray, one yellow, magenta, a burgundy, and one cyan (which I figured people would use light blue for))

Given that there are some conflicts, here’s another poll.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MJFP69D

Damage should obviously be red. :D

Originally posted by GameBuilder15:

Damage should obviously be red. :D

Oh certainly. It’s one I think very few people would disagree on.
What I didn’t expect was the near unanimous vote for yellow for stun, or purple for special abilities.

What conflicts? For every question the most successful answer always has at more than twice the votes of the second answer, except ‘rate of fire’ which has almost twice as much.

Edit: Also, if you ask ‘what color should stun be?’ people say yellow, but I bet if you ask ‘what color should freeze be?’ they will say light blue, and it’s the same effect. (Slow seems more of a dark blue effect to me, but YMMV)

Edit2: Btw, range is more of a light green color to me, and poison a darker green, so I don’t see the conflict at all.

What conflicts? For every question the most successful answer always has at more than twice the votes of the second answer, except ‘rate of fire’ which has almost twice as much.

Rate of Fire = Yellow
Stun = Yellow

That conflict. I can only have one yellow.

So instead of taking the second-most popular result, I threw it back to “every color not in use” and took popular opinion from that.

Edit: Also, if you ask ‘what color should stun be?’ people say yellow, but I bet if you ask ‘what color should freeze be?’ they will say light blue, and it’s the same effect.

Oh, sure, but in the game I’m calling it “stun” as I don’t have a way to slow down the creeps temporarily, as they’re running on a tween. All I can do is pause the tween, so they’re stunned. But yes, if I were to call it “freeze” it’d have a different color, but it’s not called “freeze.” It’s called “stun.”

Edit2: Btw, range is more of a light green color to me, and poison a darker green, so I don’t see the conflict at all.

I wanted more diametrically opposed colors. For blues, it’s easy as there’s blue, and there’s cyan.

Greens…are harder

This sort of stuff is based on association. If most of the games you play use yellow for stun, then yellow will become the standard stun colour. Some popular kongregate games, like gemcraft, may have a strong influence if only kongregators are participating

Originally posted by CuriousGaming:

This sort of stuff is based on association. If most of the games you play use yellow for stun, then yellow will become the standard stun colour. Some popular kongregate games, like gemcraft, may have a strong influence if only kongregators are participating

That’s not a problem. If yellow is the color used in a lot of games, then yellow is a fine color to use. I’d like to use colors that are in the general subconscious to avoid having people to have to learn a unique color set.

I’m a little surprised over the purle-special connection, but at the same time, it feels “right.”

RoF had yellow as #1 and white/light blue as #2, and Stun had yellow at #1 and light blue at #2 (personally, I would have selected white as stun); but Stun’s yellow % is double RoF’s, so I think that’s the clear winner for yellow (which would relegate RoF to white or light blue — people seem kind of ambivalent/undecided toward RoF).

Stupid Association Theories (I concur on choices where I don’t list otherwise):

Damage as red == Blood, obviously.
RoF == Not heavily associated with a particular colour. (My choice would be light blue)
Stun == No idea why this is associated with yellow. (I’d choose white)
Range == I think because people associate range with archers, and archers with men in green tights in the forest or something… Or elves (again, forests and a general love of green)…
Special Ability == Purple has long been associated with royalty. Perhaps this association is related? (royalty == not-your-average-shmuck)

Stun == yellow: in cartoons, stunned characters have yellow birds/stars dancing around their heads.

Edit: \/ This is from www.HowToMakeTablesFuckingUnreadable.com is it not?

Neat, but not actually that useful.
And I knew a lot of words had color associations like that, I just hadn’t ever seen it all in one place before

Color associations will only work to a certain extent. IMO specific color coding should only go to the extent that the colors are very relatable. For example, like GameBuilder15 said, health is generally red and not yellow. I suggest using different methods of displaying data as opposed to different colors of displaying data. Look at TD games. When you hover over/click a tower, you generally are able to see the range by looking at the circle that surrounds it. In some shooter games, you are able to see the number of bullets you are carrying simply by counting the number of bullets currently in your gun. While players will be able to relate back to color, unless the color in question is a recurring color (i.e. used for the same stats in a lot of games), finding a more minimalist method of displaying data would be a LOT more useful. Look at DiePix Arena 2. Honestly. In the upgrades bar on the right, how did you find by how much you upgraded? You counted the number of rectangles. Did colors help you? Not really.

However, that’s not to say colors cannot display information. Green, orange and red have been used for health displays a lot (Raze 2) and red is also used to show thatyou have no extra bullets, or you have been hit.

Oh, the colors will be reoccurring, don’t worry about that. I was looking for a simple textless way of conveying the information, as I need to display a lot of information in a small space so that it’s easy to locate a specific type quickly (no, that won’t make complete sense without context).

There will be detailed views as well, of course. But I wanted to reduce clicking so the player doesn’t have to search around tile-by-tile.

Typically text is the best way of conveying information. For example, the experience point system (XP) involves players improving, and having player improvements arriving in a lump after reaching a certain milestone. What better (and space-efficient) method of showing your level number than… a number.

Unfortunately, level numbers are not the best way of displaying range and health and stuff. And the typical game does not include measurement units like pixels or metres. (Unless you’d like to use tiles…) But yeah. Let’s find the best way of displaying this information.

It may be a bit easier on players to have personal stats on the pause screen. Or for towers, it may be easier for players to be able to hover over a tower, and after a short period of time, e.g. 0.5 seconds, stats appear.

Health: Usually displayed with a bar or number. You decide.
Range: Usually displayed with a circle around the player. But you probably know that already.
Rate of fire: That’s a bit harder. The typical weapon is generally equipped with a timer. When the timer stops, the weapon is swung/shot again. I suggest using that timer feature,
Damage: I don’t think most players are even interested in numbers here. Have you ever seen a player that says, “My gun can do 59 damage to a player” and can figure out how many bullets are needed to kill the final boss? Nope. I don’t think developers would even add that feature though, otherwise that would take the fun out of killing a final boss. But most players are interested in how many swings/shots it takes to kill a monster. So I would suggest adding a bestiary, where you can test your weapon out on different monsters. Or a feature that will find the strongest monster in a certain distance and how many strokes/shots it would take to kill it. That sort of thing.
Speed: Well, we don’t have measurements do we. Unless you use tiles. For example, calculate how many tiles a player can traverse in 1 second, and you have the speed in ‘tiles/second’. I don’t know. But you may not need that stat if the player is moving around on a regular basis (though I recommend adding it anyway.)

Anyway, however you do it, remember that if you’re storing everything in a space-efficient rectangle, make the more important stats at the top and bigger than the other stats, which are below the top stats and smaller. Also by hovering over the stats, you should be able to find out more detailed information about the player. Information that will make sense to the player, like what I was talking about above.

Hope this helps :D

Anyway, however you do it, remember that if you’re storing everything in a space-efficient rectangle

Try storing the information inside an 80 pixel by 80 pixel square. ;)
And having 50 of them on screen at once. :)

Now you see why text is a bad idea. I don’t need exact details displayed at that resolution, but I want the information to be available.

Or for towers, it may be easier for players to be able to hover over a tower, and after a short period of time, e.g. 0.5 seconds, stats appear.

In the end, this will be running on an iPad, no hover state.

Anyway, here’s a week-old compile. Clicking on a tile will bring up the build menu as well as display some information. It will say “LAN bonus” and all of the values will be 0 (probably). Find a tile that does not have 0s, and do it quickly. ;)
THAT is what I want this color representation for, so I can color the tiles with bars indicating the presence (and strength) of these bonuses. Similar graphs will be used when selecting a tower, but will also contain text descriptions.

Maybe you could add some visual elements directly to the squares? E.g., damage bonus could show spikes around the edges, range could show a raised dais, etc (not sure what RoF, Stun, and Poison would be, though I’m sure some visual representation could be decided upon that isn’t too esoteric). Maybe even increase or decrease each element according to the volume of the bonus (if graphics are generated through code), if you wanted to put that much effort into it. You could still have the diagrammes, but this way the player would be able to quickly determine the bonus types (if any) fairly quickly, without even having to select the space.

…of course, it is a lot more work, too…

You could start off with the primary colors and mix them to divide improved stats into tiers. For example, Red stands for damage. Green stands for speed. Combine them to get yellow (increased rate of fire). Like Gemcraft, but with towers.

Originally posted by dragon_of_celts:

Maybe you could add some visual elements directly to the squares?

That is precisely what I’m doing. ;)
But I needed to know what colors!

Originally posted by jasonjie88:

You could start off with the primary colors and mix them to divide improved stats into tiers. For example, Red stands for damage. Green stands for speed. Combine them to get yellow (increased rate of fire). Like Gemcraft, but with towers.

But towers don’t have a “speed” stat!

Week old compile is no longer a week old.
Purple is a largely meaningless bar right now, as it’s simply an average of the green and yellow ones, but when the towers themselves get these bars, it’ll be more representative. Their size is also non-linear, but is slightly compressed in the middle-values in order to get better definition at the high and low ends of the spectrum (i.e. with linear interpolation, any value under 0.3 was basically lost, and any value over 0.7 was hard to distinguish between).

Just wondering, did you take into consideration you bars should have major and minor axes? I mean, if you’re just using bars and not numbers, it’s going to be awfully hard for you players to understand the statistics represented by the bars. You should really use rectangles for bars. Look at Help the Hero. Even without the labels beside the bars, that’s what you’re looking for. A measurable method of analysing your statistics. Otherwise no-one will understand the bars.

Range circles aren’t accurate (this wasn’t a problem before). Wave 11 completed without a problem (one creep got to about the halfway point before succumbing). Wave 12 yielded apparently undamageable creeps (or, if they were damaged, it was so slight as to be virtually unnoticeable; all got through). Screen is a wee bit too big for me, but it is playable (not sure what the tower icons at the bottom are for — didn’t pay attention to them after the start, as I had to move the screen to encompass the playing field, which made those icons go mostly off screen).

No, I think Draco18s is basing his collision checks on hexagons as opposed to circles. So the range circles aren’t accurate. But if you’re going to do that, you might as well find out where the towers should monitor. You know. For each tower, mark the parts of the path where the tower should shoot at if an enemy’s on them? It would save the number of collision checks needed.

Originally posted by dragon_of_celts:

Wave 11 completed without a problem (one creep got to about the halfway point before succumbing). Wave 12 yielded apparently undamageable creeps (or, if they were damaged, it was so slight as to be virtually unnoticeable; all got through).

Wave 11 should be 20 creeps at 300, Wave 12 should be 5 at 1300. Roughly an 8% increase in total health. There might still be an error in where it’s reading the info from (i.e. 5 creeps at 300, then 20 at 1300; which I had to debug before).
No unintentional errors. Creeps are likely too strong.
Before I go and tweak their health, what was your tower setup like? Lots of chemo y/n? Did you have a targeted therapy tower?

Originally posted by jasonjie88:

Just wondering, did you take into consideration you bars should have major and minor axes?

It uses a radial axis.
Only it’s filled in, rather than lines (due to being easier to build in Unity, as well as easier to read).

Originally posted by jasonjie88:

No, I think Draco18s is basing his collision checks on hexagons as opposed to circles.

Nope, it’s circular. There was likely a math hiccup when I transitioned from the square tiles (with one scale modifier) to the hexagons (another). Had this issue once before. I forgot to look into it when I swapped models, as I was sure I’d kept the same world-scale and just tweaked the import settings. Ay yup. The range circles are…slightly more than half the size they should be. WTF.
Fixed for next build.