Attribute icons

[Roots]

I've been thinking that perhaps we should create a new set of icons to represent character attributes. I'm talking about: HP, SP, strength, fortitude, agility, etc. Right now we represent these categories with brief abbreviations like "Str" or "Agi" in the battle finish menu (when a character levels up). I think it would look better and be a little easier to understand to use icons in this type of situation. Plus, we don't have to worry about translations for that.

The icon size I'm proposing would be small, about 25x25 pixels or so. Pretty much the same dimensions as our current icons for status effects, elementals, and target types. They shouldn't be difficult to create either, and I wouldn't mind providing a first run at them. What do you guys think? Would you prefer to use icons, or rely on words describing the attributes as we have done in the past?

[rujasu]

No, I think icons would be worse. Abbreviations are easy to understand -- I can tell with absolutely no trouble that STR means strength. I can generally figure out that a picture of a muscle also corresponds to strength, but usually about half of the icons I have no earthly idea about. Please do not do this.

[nemesis]

I must agree to rusjasu. Thinking back to old Might And Magic games, there were 20 or more icons representing all stats of charakter. Took me a while to understand everything. Otherwise I don't like the abbreviations, so written words (after some rearrangement and reduced font size) would also look good.

Another option can be tooltips but without mouse support this doesn't make sense.

[Roots]

Hmm, okay I'll pass on this then. Although we sort of already have icons for all the attributes, because we have status effects that affect each attribute and those must have an icon, so I thought it would be more natural to draw a connection between the two.

[rujasu]

I must agree to rusjasu. Thinking back to old Might And Magic games, there were 20 or more icons representing all stats of charakter. Took me a while to understand everything. Otherwise I don't like the abbreviations, so written words (after some rearrangement and reduced font size) would also look good.

Heh, actually, Might and Magic III is exactly what I was thinking of. The icons in that were effectively useless because there were so many. You at least had the words next to the icons to explain, but that took up a lot of screen space.