Hi everyone!

I'd like to spark a little discussion about health in games. For my LD I made a game where the player has a health bar but also a timer which both contribute to the player death. Basically the timer continually goes down and can be incremented by picking up medicine, and the health bar works as expected. The interesting part (at least to me) is that when you let the timer go under 30 seconds you take half damage from bullets and twice the damage from melee attacks.

The idea here is that the player has to make tough decisions on whether they can take time to look for medicine to up their timer or just go to the next level and hope they can find it faster this, combined with other pressures, makes the player do tough decisions.

In the comments of my jam someone suggested that I either remove the health bar or the timer and not have both. I completely agree. I think the game would play better without a health bar, and where when the timer reaches 0 the player doesnt immediately die, but instead dies immediately if they get hit ("one shot"). This should allow for skilled players to flex their skill and knowledge of the game. I still would have to think more about this idea, but I really do think that games that take alternative approaches to health can be very interesting.

If you guys know of games that take alternative approaches to health or have comments on this topic leave them below!