This week have I worked with the pause menu, customization menu, options menu and quit menu. The color scheme in the menus is the same as the avatar has. And I think it looks good and works well with the overall art style of the game. I had some worries that the brown would be too much and look boring, but I think it worked out fine.
The flaps are used to switch between the different menus. We chose flaps because they are easy to understand and are used frequently by other applications, and are therefore already familiar for the player. No extra time is needed for the player to understand the menus.
This is how the customization menu looks like in its current state:
It is important that this menu is easy to understand, because upgrading the character is important and a big part of our game.
You pick up textiles that are placed throughout the game world, and use them to upgrade your avatars stats. There are four different kinds of upgrades (textiles). Cotton that gives you extra health, silk that gives you extra speed, wool that makes you stealthier and leather that increases your attack damage.
We tried to have the textiles to the right side and that you first clicked one of the empty slots above the suit then selected what textile you wanted. But after a play testing session, we saw that the menu wasn’t clear enough, and almost every one clicked on the textiles first then the empty slot. So we changed it to the following.
So this is how it works, you click on one of the textiles on the left side, the small box beneath shows what that properties are for the selected textile. You then click one of the empty slots in the middle, above the suit to equip it. Then the big box on the right shows the combine stats of all the textiles that are equipped.
There is not that much to be said about the other menus, but I’m going to anyway.
This is the options menu:
Music and sound effects slider to the left and controls on the right, that you can change to your own preferences.
This is the map menu:
We don’t plan to have anything else in this menu, just a dot or something to show your position in the game world.
This is the quit menu:
You are given two choices either to quit to main menu or quit to windows.
Calmius 