Menu!

Hey everyone, Mad Monkey Games here! For this update I will be talking about the game’s menu.

First thing I did was lay out the design and positioning of all the menu elements in an image editor. Something I wanted to really focus on that I have struggled with making other menus is adding more motion to everything. This makes the menu livelier and more responsive compared to everything just sitting there doing nothing. So, the first thing I did was make the menu background tiled so it could slowly scroll in the background. It took me a little while to decide what to do with the title but what I ended up doing was making it slowly grow and rotate and then shrink and rotate back to its normal size.

For the buttons I simply thought I would make it so that when the mouse hovered over a button it would get bigger then return to its normal size when the mouse left. This worked but the problem was it was instantly becoming bigger and smaller resulting in an unappealing choppy look.

So, what I did was use a handy GameMaker Studio 2 function called lerp. This function gradually increases or decreases a value towards another value. I used this to smoothly transition the buttons between two sizes removing the choppy look and making the whole thing feel much better.

Thanks for reading! feel free to post any comments or ideas.