Adding a Heads-Up Display

Learn how to add a rendering layer and render a heads-up display.

Most games display information about the players such as their health, maybe their names, any power-ups they may have, or perhaps some other useful information. Whatever the data may be, it gets displayed on the screen, usually near the top of the main game display in what’s known as a heads-up display (HUD), which is named after military hardware that lets pilots see data about their aircraft without looking down at an instrument panel.

We need the HUD to render on top of the map, in a smaller font so that it is both easier to read and can contain more detail than we could fit on a layer with huge graphical tiles.

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