Damage numbers, show it or not?

It depends on the game really. Damage numbers are cool in some games for sure... rpg's for one. In fighting games I don't really like to see them. To me it would matter how detailed the rpg upgrades are and how important they will feel to the player. If you feel they will be very important to the player and have a huge impact on gameplay then showing the numbers could definitely be a good thing. Otherwise, I'd skip it.

p.s. I dig the art

 

My opinion:
If you show healthbars and have numbers on said healthbars, you should almost definitely be showing numbers when you're subtracting them.

If your character can advance in the amount of damage they do per hit, you should probably be showing damage numbers as that's the easiest way to show that they are hitting harder.

If your character doesn't progress, and you don't see how much further you need to go to bring a monster down, the numbers become noisy and clunky.

so... like Stingman was getting at: it depends on the game.

 

If the game involves the character or weapon getting stronger, I think you definitely should have the numbers show. When you boil down an RPG, aside from story and exploration, the fun really is just the reward of seeing numbers get bigger. Popular games like A Dark Room and Bitcoin Billionaire rely almost exclusively on number growing as the source of fun. Let your players experience the bigger impact of stronger weapon as a reward.

 

I personally like seeing my damage numbers get bigger and bigger with each upgrades. You mentioned that there will be upgrades so I think players will want to see that they got stronger visually.

 

i think you should show it.

without numbers its kinda boring.

 

Make it an option..?

 

yea man make it an option, id want it for practice purposes to see which attacks do what damage, but afterwards id want a cleaner visual experience.