It may seem strange that I started making a menu before making anything else. There are 4 of us making this and my job was making the menu and managing the levels. I started the level management first but came across a few problems and became frustrated with it for a while. Thankfully those problems have now been solved however I had already created the menu beforehand.
Creating a menu in XNA is a time consuming process. Unless you are going to commit to using an openly available UI library you are going to need to create all the UI elements yourself. I started off by designing the assets for the UI, mainly the buttons and the logo. This is where the mood for the menu was decided upon. I went for a calm effect with not too many colours because the game will be a slow paced puzzler with some shooting segments and I felt that it would fit well with the tone of the game. The font used in the logo is part of the XNA redistribution pack.
Next up was actually the creation of the main menu. I created a menu manager game component to manage the drawing and input. Then there was the creation of a button class and a list of buttons in the menu manager class and lastly the positioning and drawing of the buttons. After this I felt that it was too static and needed some movement.
I then set about adding some depth and movement to the menu for added effect. I first created a particle class. I then created a particle generator class to manage the drawing and the movement of the particles. To add the illusion of depth I gave each particle a random speed and a random colour between dark grey and white. When it all came together it added a nice feeling of depth to the scene.
Now for the finished menu.
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