Entry 03 - Easter Break
My third post, and a short one at that.
This past week we’ve designated as holidays on account of the Easter break, I think we needed one since it hasn’t been long since the end of our semester. Regardless I did manage to get a little bit more of the main menu done.
Scrolling Background Image
To give the main menu less of a “static” quality, I wanted to implement a scrolling background to give the player the impression that the game was active. After some research on the simplest way of achieving this, I created a quad object and applied the background I wanted to scroll as the quad’s material. Then I made it so that the quad material’s offset is continuously being moved to the bottom right of the screen. A simple enough operation, but it has already greatly enhanced the menu’s presentation.
This transparent background scrolls in the main menu’s background.
Options and Quit Sub-menus
The options screen, quite simple for now.
I also took some time this week to create the options menu and the quit menu. For now, our options menu will simply allow the player to adjust the master volume, along with the BGM and SFX volumes individually. In terms of graphics settings, all we will have for now will be a fullscreen toggle, since graphics settings are not often altered as much for 2D games. If we want to add more later on it’s a simple matter of adding the extra options.
The quit screen.
I’ve also added in the quit screen, this prompt will appear when the player has selected “quit” on the main menu. This ensures that the player doesn’t quit accidentally. I’ve also ensured that the first highlighted option is “no”, this is common UX feature preventing the player from accidentally selecting destructive options.
That’s about it for this week, as for the next week, I plan to have the main menu UI completely finished and coded. After that I can move on to collectibles implementation as well as saving and loading.
‘Til next time.
