Project Gray

The second game design pillar was Immersion, and it was important to me that the player feels like the avatar, not someone playing the avatar. UI creates a clear division of what you can see and want the avatar can see, so I wanted a spotless interface, nothing on the screen whatsoever so that the avatar and the player have the same information available to them—leading to me recreating the standard health bar found in 80% of games. Project Gray still had a health bar from 100 to 0 because there needed to be a way for some attacks to hit harder than others, but it was not showcased and was only used in the game's background. I also didn't want to run into a case where you could be on one hit kill, and something light like a kick would suddenly make your heart stop beating. I opted to use three health states. Instead, the player could either be healthy, injured, or at death's door. Healthy was pretty straightforward, and just a starting point for the character; injured was a slight change in attack speed and a visual indicator that the fight was going south, but Death's Door is where things got interesting while in the Death's Door state, AI would still use their regular attacks, while mixing in some "finisher moves."
Finisher Moves were two-step moves that would kill the player if they got hit by both attacks. The first slide above shows an example of a finisher move. The orc kicks the player and then slams down his massive machete. The fun part comes in the timing of the attack; there is a very narrow window that allows the player to dodge out of the attack too early, and his allowed turn radius still hits you too late, and you've already been hit. This gave the game a natural feeling revive system because you were already dead by all accounts of a classic game.