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I'm currently working on multiplayer game and am trying to work out how to display respawn times. I had a few ideas in mind, taking inspiration from other games I've played before.

  • Text Based
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  • Progress Bar
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  • Visual Timer
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Is there another way to display respawning for players that improves visual feedback? Meaning, is clear and effective at conveying exactly how long a player has to wait to respawn?

yuritsuki
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  • This Question can't be answered correctly since you are asking about opinions, but here is mine: I would use the text-based timer, but this depends on what kind of game this is. – tkausl Nov 18 '14 at 09:03
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    This question might fit a bit better on https://ux.stackexchange.com - they sometimes give surprisingly objective answers to questions about UI design which seem as opinion-based as this one. – Philipp Nov 18 '14 at 12:22
  • Also, just one word: playtest. Playtest, playtest, playtest. A surprising amount of questions on this SE could be answered just by playtesting. – angarg12 Nov 18 '14 at 14:17
  • @angarg12 Game is still in development – yuritsuki Nov 18 '14 at 15:43
  • I agree with Philipp that this is more a usability consideration and less one of game design (if I may claim for a second that these two topics were distinct even if they aren't quite). Every new UI element adds cognitive load, forces the user to choose what to look at next, and distracts from actual gameplay. So I'd say the leave respawn timer out and just respawn, unless you have a hard gameplay reason for doing it differently. – uliwitness Nov 19 '14 at 07:52
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    @banal desires Not a problem. In fact that is the point of playtest, to get feedback before committing to anything. Some people encourage doing paper-and-pencil playtesting before even writing any line of code to flesh out gameplay details. – angarg12 Nov 19 '14 at 08:51
  • @angarg12 Good point, I think I'll go ahead and do that, thanks for the advice – yuritsuki Nov 19 '14 at 08:57

1 Answers1

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The "correct" answer depends on what determines the time. Is it a fixed time that's always the same (or <= 3 different times)? And how long is it? Why do you want the user to know how long it will take? Is it enough time to grab a bite to eat? Or is it a short time the user will be waiting in front of the screen for?

Because if it's short, why show the user exact information? The equivalent of "one moment please" to keep them in front of the screen and make them aware that the game hasn't locked up in some weird way is enough. It would be different if it's a long time, because then the user may want to get up and start the coffee maker or whatever.

Also, if it is always the same delay, the user will likely get used to the delay, so the only one who really wants to know how long it takes in seconds is someone who dies for the first time. Later, people will know what to expect, so don't need that information displayed.

I personally find long artificial waits annoying, and rather enjoy how World of Warcraft handles it, where you immediately respawn as a ghost at a graveyard nearby and then have to walk back to your corpse to actually be reunited with your body. That way you have a penalty (you have to walk back to where you died), but you get a kind of gameplay and stay "inside the world" and do not really drop out of immersion. Of course, if you were in the middle of a mob when you died you may die again immediately, but hey, that can be solved by massaging the mob AI to avoid corpses, I guess.

I also like the approach Call of Duty has, where you simply respawn immediately in some random location and can immediately get back into the game. As you obviously died and didn't complete whatever objective you had, you've had a short delay already, and you might have to go back to your team, causing a second delay that encourages you not to die in the future.

uliwitness
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