Creating the Main Menu

Introduction

Menu creation can be one of the most difficult & time consuming parts of developing your game, depending on exactly what you have in mind for it. Do you plan on creating a professional menu that remembers all of the players configuration choices each time the game is opened? do you plan on adding a true new/resume game button? do you plan on adding an achievement/bonus content system? or maybe even a fully functional save, load & delete game system?

I will try to cover as much of the menu creation as possible in this page, but please bear in mind that there are multiple ways to go about creating your menu & well pretty much everything else in Visionaire Studio can be approached in this fashion.

Initial Setup

First things first: you want to click on the scene tab & then create a new scene menu, which we will use to add our option buttons to. Next you want to click on the new menu scene, rename it to something that makes sense to you & then you want to click on it's properties tab & add a background image to it; remember that the background image will define the width & height of the menu, so as a general rule it should be the same height & width as your default game resolution - unless, of course, you are planning on making a scrollable menu scene. You also want to select the mouse cursor to be used for the menu & the background music, if you plan on adding some.

Additional Information

It is possible to create your menu on a single menu scene or you can break it down into multiple menu scenes. It is common practice to add the save game menu to it's own menu scene.

New Game/Resume Game Buttons

Both the new game & the resume game buttons require the use of if queries & the quicksave system to check if the game should be resumed from the scene of the current character or by loading a previously saved game. I will quickly explain how to setup both of these buttons.