I swapped out the health numbers and ammo numbers for the game. Still frame looks alright now but personally I think the ammo count size needs more work. Also the whole thing is sliding off the screen which makes me think I need to recreate the whole UI widget from scratch. The biggest accomplishment here is getting the hex pattern for that health bar. For my 2d art I primarily use GIMP (https://www.gimp.org/) and gimp is usually good about having a pathway to do whatever you need. I would say around 80% of the time you can google “how to blah in GIMP” and you have 20+ years of history to rely on to get some kind of idea on how to do things. For that last 20% the solution is usually involves ripping an image from somewhere else to use as a stencil or as a basis for a built-in filter. In this case it was the latter. Gimp has filters for making a square checkerboard and diamonds but nothing for hex’s except for a “mozaic” filter. Which looks fine on paper but if you’re messing with the alpha you need very exact lines and the mozaic filter makes a pattern that includes a simulated light which annoyingly blurs the edges. However, the edges aren’t blurred by a gradient color (which can be easily fixed) but is blurred by adding a gradient to the alpha.
I tried everything to get rid of these edges but failed miserably: edge detection, thresholding, median blurs, contrast and color selection all seemed to maintain the gradient off the edge lines. I eventually gave up and used the suggestion from “chaz_prinz” here: https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/rg5wt4/creating_a_borderless_hexagon_gridpattern/ and ripped a hex pattern from the internet to generate a black/white image which I was able to use for the pattern.
I ended up with a pretty nice pattern here:
Which I threw into a filled green rectangle to get the health bar above (plus some trimming/filling around the edges). I think the result is quite nice and fits the whole old-er school vibe that I’m going for. I might make it red just to fit the obvious ascetics from every other game in existence but I figure I’d fix up the ammo up first.