After some work on the battle GUI, it seems that having a unified display method for health, skill points, and essence makes the design sleeker and easier on the eye than anything else I've come up with. So the twist band has evolved from a double-helix to a triple-helix, with one band representing health, one representing skills and skill points, and the last one being the one that essence is held in (which also doubles as the wait timer during battle). Jakub is working on some sketches to illustrate the whole concept. The ones shown below, while not true to our visual style, show the revised twist band and an essence weapon:



The sketch on the right is truer to our overall desired look (thicker lines, more comical).

Here's a shot of a battle GUI mock-up:



The elements are explained in the picture, but for anyone who's reading this, I'd really love to hear any feedback or suggestions you have about this sample GUI - namely if it makes sense or not. Even though you may not understand everything about it, does it make sense with the text explanations? Can you tell what is what (specifically with the representation of the twist band)?

You can see that the essence band of the twist has four slots to hold essence. I think that having a large icon to show the type of essence in each slot is a good way to go. While it will take the player a little while to get to know all of the different icons and their meanings, the game should introduce them at a learnable rate; that, combined with intuitive depictions (i.e. a little flame icon = fire elemental essence), should make the display easy to understand.

One element in the picture that may be slightly misleading is the presence of large numbers in the upper right-hand corner of each essence slot box. These numbers aren't numbering the slots; the number "1" will pop up when essence is drawn into each slot, indicating level 1 essence. If the player "boosts" the essence (to make it more powerful), the number changes to "2" and so forth. This gives the player a quick visual snapshot of the complete status of each character's twist band, and what's available for him/her to use in battle.

As always, comments are welcome. We're here to serve you, and the more input we get, the better the end product will be. :)