Neon Genesis Evangelion-Inspired Diegetic HUD For Space Game

ninetailedoctopus gave some insight into their approach.

According to ninetailedoctopus, the AAA Wunder from the Rebuild of Evangelion film series was the main inspiration behind this design. They explained that spaceships in the game can become very small or invisible, making it easy for players to lose track of them. Instead of using compass bars or HP bars, which they felt were "boring," they created a diegetic HUD, where the UI exists as part of the game world.

This is a reference for how the characters in the game see the HUD:

Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo

"In the lore, the combat bridge AR was developed from the F-35's all-aspect sensor fusion tech, but it's now a shared AR by bridge crew, who sit in the center of an armored capsule which is also a holographic tank. Non-augmented people see the screens on the capsule walls, augmented people see the screens and the hologram in the spaces between."

Unfortunately, there are very few details available about the game itself. However, ninetailedoctopus did share how they created this effect, and, spoiler, it's not a 3D model:

"Imagine an AR sphere surrounding the ship, parented to it. You then make a set of GDScript global tool functions that draw stuff on that sphere - lines, chevrons, arcs, basically polylines with a width, with a bunch of math. It outputs a set of vertices and indices, ready for putting into an ArrayMesh.

You then make another set of functions in that GDScript file that transform and repeat lines, like repeat_arc or repeat_line, which takes vertices as previously constructed and then transforms it in another vector.

The final mesh is then baked into an ArrayMesh. Manual authoring does the rest - positioning, scaling adjustments. Then you bake nodes that rotate as a unit into several tscns, like compass rings, pitch ladders. Then you take the baked scenes, then rotate them along the proper axes, referencing the ship's transform and state. Setting TopLevel=on or manually unrotating stuff is how I made them fixed.

The health/armor display at the bottom is just a bunch of hex prisms representing armor health. Armor grid and iteration through X, Y, Z, straightforward stuff.

The key here is to have a really good reference and art style you can key things off. I also did a ton of research on aircraft HUDs too. Or you can just model in Blender, but I wanted the math to be correct."

Here's how they explained adding the glow to the lines:

"Enable HDR (it usually is by default on Forward+). Draw some stuff. For vertex things, set the color intensity in the color picker to >1.0. For textures, same thing but you have to import as HDR. Or you can use a shader and increase emission in the fragment shader.

You can also use a standard material and set emission directly or add an emission map.

Finally, add an Environment, enable Glow, and fiddle with the levels. Enjoy your glowy goo/particles/tentacles!"

This isn't the first time the developer has shared a look behind the scenes. Previously, they showed how they created the game's clouds by modifying Bonkahe's Sunshine Clouds 2 plug-in to produce volumetric clouds.

"Performance enhancements, world-space raycasting, jitter fixes, toon shading. Takes 8ms to render native-size on my laptop 4070. Currently doing TAAU (TAA with upscaling) so that I can render it at half res for a fast 2-3ms."

And here's a floating island generator and a combat test:

The game is currently being developed using Godot 4.7. To stay updated on its progress and catch the Steam page release, follow ninetailedoctopus on Reddit.

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