Grimstone Valley is a combat-centered game that requires quick and creative thinking. Players can defeat their foes by utilizing their environment or by launching their enemies around combat zones. So as to not obfuscate view of the playing field, the game's HUD is fairly minimal.

The HUD and in-game UI consists of player and enemy health bars, an objective display and world markers, and interaction prompts.

I created the art assets for all of these HUD elements, as well as integrated them into the existing health, objective, and interaction scripts.

The Scab and Snipeling, the game's basic enemy types, display their current health above their heads. Since combat tends to be fast-paced and numerous enemies can be present in the same fight, the health bars are very minimal in their design. The Wroughtboar, the game's final boss, has a similar health bar that is instead anchored to the top of the screen. This is both to give the boss a bit more impact and to make sure the boss's health is always available to the player, since the enemy itself can run off screen.

At one point in development, enemy UI also included status effect timers. These displayed how long an enemy would be bleeding, burning, or grabbed by the player. Ultimately, the information these timers provided was rarely actionable and the UI mostly just created more clutter. We cut these timers from the game, a decision I supported.

I designed and created the art assets for both the health bars and timers, and integrated these new visuals into the existing enemy health scripts.

Throughout the game, there are numerous collectibles, characters, and items the player can interact with, and all of these are tagged with an interaction marker. I designed several different markers to be used for different interaction contexts.

For any optional collectibles or conversations, the marker is only present while the player is within a set radius. For any critical items or dialogue, the marker will always be present.​

When the player is within a given range to an interactable, an instructional prompt will also appear. This displays both what the interaction is as well as what key to press to trigger the interaction.