Creating the Menu Transitions

For the menu transitions I wanted to have good looking animations between transitions rather than having it just switch between the menus and sub-menus instantly because the menu is the first thing people see when they go into your game. I also felt that animations in the menu added to the overall quality of the game. So I settled on a sliding animation. When you pushed the options button the main menu would slide off to the left and the options would slide on from the right. If you wanted to go back to the main menu the options screen would slide off and main menu slides back onto the screen. The same operation would happen for the level selector button.

Here you can see the butons sliding off the screen

To do this animation the first thing I did was set an off-screen and on-screen position for all the menu screens. When you press the options button the top-most button on the main menu will start to slide off to the off-screen position. Once that button passes a specified position the second button will start to slide and then the next and the next until all the buttons have reached the off-screen position. This gives you a domino effect. After this the options screen will start to slide to the on-screen position from the opposite side.

Here the buttons are sliding back onto the screen

I hope you found this interesting. Discussing menu making is not the most interesting part of game making but it is essential. This may be the last post about the menu for a while.