Minimal HUD in the Inlaid Library: XP bar, 2:16 timer, LV 8

About this game

Developer: poncle · Publisher: poncle · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Pixel art · Screen type: HUD & Gameplay UI

More Vampire Survivors screens in the Gallery

What to study

This is the deliberately minimal HUD the game is famous for, and the frame shows how little of it there is: one experience bar with the level tucked into its corner, a timer, a kill count, a gold count, and the weapon/passive slots, everything else a survival player might expect (a health bar, a minimap, cooldowns) is either moved into the world as a small red bar under the sprite or simply not shown. The design works because the game has one verb, move, so the HUD's only jobs are 'how close is the next level-up' and 'how long have I survived', and both are answered by the top band in one glance while the rest of the 1920x1080 frame stays pure arena. Frame at about 0:20 in the October 2022 - v1.0 Trailer (Steam; manual extraction from the 1 fps fine pass, the scene-change survivors from this trailer are mostly the same library floor at busier moments, several carrying trailer quote overlays; this beat is clean).

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

minimal-hud top-bar status-row

Components

Parts on screen.

List Portrait Minimap Vitals bar Progress bar Slots Quest tracker

Screen inventory

• the entire permanent HUD is one thin band at the top of the screen: a blue experience bar filling roughly a quarter of the top edge, 'LV 8' in its right corner, there is no health bar for the player anywhere on the screen; health exists only as the small red bar under the character sprite in the world
• under the experience bar at top left, the build so far is two short icon rows: the owned weapon icons (a blue spell book and a magic wand among them) with empty grey slots still waiting beside them, and a second row beginning the passive items, the loadout is read as filled and unfilled slots, never as a list
• the only other readouts share the top band: the run timer '2:16' centred, and at the right a skull kill count of 661 and a gold count of 0, kills and money get one small number each
• in the world, information is carried by the sprites themselves: blue experience gems litter the floor tiles, small white damage numbers (17, 13, 11) pop off enemies, and the character, a robed figure at centre with the red bar beneath, is the screen's only framed object
• no minimap, no portrait, no ability cooldowns, no quest text: at 2:16 into an Inlaid Library run the screen is a tiled floor, two kinds of monster, and that one top band

Top 3 colors

#575957 26%#5f605f 22%#202220 17%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© poncle, Vampire Survivors screenshot: Steam trailers (Refreshed Trailer / October 2022 - v1.0 Trailer / December 2021 - Early Access Release), poncle, shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by poncle.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-24. verified 2026-10-24: manual extraction manual-hud-library-20.png @ ~20s in the October 2022 - v1.0 Trailer, MD5 c71eb10114e18836cdc4913a6240c59a, from the verified-clean curl-shim download (44,890,270 B, MD5 2d81707a39590d5be2eacf929b4bb65f; full decode to null exit 0, zero error lines, decode-steam-1794680-October-2022-v1-0-Trailer.mp4.err), inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080 native); the blue XP bar with LV 8, timer 2:16, skull count 661, gold 0, the top-left weapon/passive slots and the red bar under the character all legible; no trailer quote or marketing overlay in frame

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-24); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.