Hi all! This is your UI/UX Artist Paul here. This week we're going over the revised Targeting Reticles and Player Self Monitors design elements! 

While in the fray of your outerspace battles, you want to know who's who and what they're doing (and what you're doing to them) upfront, instantly, and without taking your eye of the action. How does one do that? By placing the most vital information right where the eyes are going to be in the first place. That is the purpose of the "heads up display" after all. The trick is what to put where, and to use what is already there. 

One aspect was to utilize the targeting reticles to convey simple information regarding the target they overlay. In this case the reticle will communicate two things: if the ship in question is moving closer to or retreating away from, and which ship the player has locked onto if any. This requires the reticle to be simple but also distinct between its states, as there are going to be a lot of these things on-screen during the particularly hectic space dogfights. These are still experimental, as the only way to tell for sure how well they function is to get into as much trouble in-game as possible. Thus further evolution of these designs will likely happen.

Further developments have also been made to the Player Self Monitor. Continuing an established hexagon theme, four hexagonal readouts divided into 6 wedges each will provide damage indicators for the player covering their ship in all spatial orientations. Color coding indicates severity with an intuitive green = "good," yellow = "watch out maybe," and red = "trouble." Each wedge changes color independently, allowing for a simplified sense of where damage is being taken on ones' vessel without taking the time to look for individual armor facets. Time and further testing will tell us how these elements will grow and adapt to the game's needs as well.