I'm Makin A Game: Enemy Life Bars?

Are Enemy Health Bars Necessary?

I've had this discussion with friends and random people online, and it's still a split jury. I personally feel that in a game like this, you'd want to be able to keep track of or at least have an indication of how much you've damaged or how much life an enemy has remaining as you're fighting it. I did some research (see: played some games) and it looks like the majority of beatem up games tend to NOT have life bars for the enemies. The exception being boss battles in which case, the reverse is true, almost all boss characters have life bars. This should indicate to any normal person to ditch life bars but I'm abnormal. . .

My Yes Argument

I feel that this game in particular would benefit from health bars because I plan on enemies in this game having much more life than your average throw away minion in other beat em ups. The game will be somewhat combo driven so in addition to the joy of knowing how much more damage an enemy can take before expiring, it's crucial knowledge for the player to have so that he/she can plan on when the current enemy will be dead, and mid combo to be able to begin planning on who to attack next. In other beat em ups, combo's aren't very important to the game aside from a way to dish out more damage than with singular attacks. Hopefully, my game will be different.

What Doesn't Work

Near when I first started working on this game, thinking that I'd need lifebars, I went ahead and implemented the traditional type. The enemy you hit last, will pop up on the top of the screen with their portrait and their life bar. This is okay, but there's a lot of problems with this. For starters, if you're talking about more than say 3 or 4 mobs that you're fighting at a time, you're not going to be able to remember which was which in most cases and since the game will be fast paced, you'll quickly lose track of who has what. In addition to that, lots of moves will hit multiple enemies at a time and in that case, you further have no clue who's portrait it is that is currently active. Oh. . . and it's troublesome to look up to see how much health someone has left as well. Seriously, in a big fight, nobody is gonna wanna be constantly looking up there during gameplay to check up on how much health is left meaning, it's not serving its purpose.

My Solution

I've got this vid up that shows what I've done to solve this problem. It's not perfect, but I think it's good enough to get across the information I want the player to have. Which is a general idea of how much life an enemy has left. The traditional, non health bar route for 2D action games has been to blink the enemy sprite in and out or the ever popular, blink between their normal color and a red tinted version. That's old and janky and I refuse =P What I've got going on is the hit splash. Basically, the splash will change color depending on how much health the enemy has left. Starting from and through Green, Yellow, Orange, Red, and Dark Red. The player keeps his/her attention where the action is and will get immediate feedback on the status of the enemy in question. While they won't be able to glance at an enemy that's far away and know, they will immediately be informed as soon as combat is engaged. I personally feel that this is a good solution but if anyone has any other ideas, I'm always open to listen =)

I highly recommend watching this in 720p. You really can't see what's going on at this low a resolution -_-;;

The effect is still a work in progress. I'll be changing the graphics of it eventually but for now it's good enough for me to move onto other things =)

UPDATE: fixed the direction the splash goes in and added proper borders.

Update: My final update to the splash effect for now. I'll revisit it later on but for now, it's good enough to move onto more important things. . . like everything else -_-;;