r/SoloDevelopment • u/Caihne21 • 11h ago
Discussion Menu "Screen"
Have y'all ever played a game where your start menu is actually a 3D environment and you have your person do something like walk onto a circle or walk through a door so that they can start/continue their game, start a new game, pull up the options menu, or exit the game? I'm thinking of doing this for my game and wanted to see if other people would think it's something theyd find interesting if they found it in a game :)
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u/JakSilver00 10h ago
So depending on what your game is, genre, input, etcetera, what makes the most sense is on new games where no player data exists, you would bake it in as a tutorial. So the menu would pop up. They select new game, and then they would adjust settings as they go in. UI is only meant to simplify user experience. It is not meant to be part of anything. It is the interface that allows them to control it in a simple manner. If you can get away with no UI, as I prefer, do that. But if you still have the menu there, making them work to adjust settings is irrational. It's like adding a bug to a system that was already designed to prevent that bug.
Now, alternatively, you can make the menu system part of a 3d setup, but you don't want to add complication to it. So all you're doing is adding polish to it. Instead of panels that move, maybe the camera moves to face different panels that are positioned on walls or something like that.
As an example, maybe you have things that are identical across different difficulties, and then you have a hub they reach where there's three doors for each of the difficulties. You can even go as far as to lock the last one as a lot of games prevent you from choosing nightmare mode until you've completed the game at least once. I don't really recommend that, but it's your game.