The Weapon Element/Inventory Display is one of the most crucial elements in the design of the Crystalline HUD. Due to the weapon sandbox having a single type of ammunition it is tasked with providing the player with a litany of vital information.
First, the player must know what weapons are available to them. To achieve this goal I created silhouette sprites for each gun and massaged the actual outlines to produce several visually coherent yet unique identifiers for the different weapon types. While the player already has this information in the form of the first person gun mesh, it is important to reinforce this information to the player and follows in the tradition of first person shooters established all the way back with Wolfenstein 3D. Additionally, the sprites are designed to face the edge of the screen rather than the center in effort to accentuate the ammo readouts with the eye leading nature of the weapon barrels.
HUD sprite sheet for weapon icons.
Crystalline 