Main Menu Design: part 1

A game's main menu is the first aspect of a game that a player will see and as such it is important that the design of the menus is well thought out. Most importantly this means that the navigation can easily be mastered by the target audience. However just because this is the most important does not mean that all one has to do is navigation and just throw the rest together at the last minute. As these menus will be the first aspects of the game the player sees it is important that they reflect the game’s look and feel. This way the player never loses their immersion in the game whenever they are not playing the game. Heavy Rain’s main menu is a great example of how the menu system can reflect the game’s look and feel. The scene matches the games dark and gritty tone as well as the photorealistic look. Just from this one scene the player can get a feeling of what type of game they are about to play and what they have been playing. With all of this in mind I set up to design the menu system for Remote Shepherd.

Heavy Rain's Main Menu

I decided to start the design with the background for the menus. I first looked at Heavy Rain because our game has the same dark gritty tones and is set in a rundown city. I liked the idea of using a live scene set in the game but I decided this did not match the comic book narrative style of the game.

Batman: Arkham Asylum's Main Menu

Next I took a look at Batman: Arkham Asylum because it both matched the tone of our game and is based on a comic book. I liked the use of batman in iconic poses set on a rooftop but this conflicted with our plan for the player.

After that I looked at Halo Reach because it used an animated comic book art style for its backgrounds. This fit perfectly with where we were heading for our cut scenes and I really liked the effect. Another thing I noticed and liked about these backgrounds is that they changed from menu to menu. This is something that we could use to reflect the change of perspective that happens in our game.