--- DevDiary ---

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- 2023/04/22 -

This week, I worked on the menu systems.

This entry is the shortest one yet, as there are no notable moments in the process of creating a menu. Creating a system of menus to navigate between different buttons and submenus is relatively simple, but the awkward difficulty rises whenever a button should do something fundamental and unique, such as starting a level, changing various game settings, and affecting other menu elements. This is where the unrestricted modularity of menu systems clashes with nearly hard-coded functionality of said menu systems, and I find it hard to keep both ends of the task's scale in my mind without burning out.

The original game had just three types of menus: the main menu, the difficulty selection menu, and the restart menu. All of them were increasingly tiny, both in code and in graphics. But SD2020 was also incomplete, as the main menu lacked such things as level selector, replay selector and options. At the same time, the code of SD2020 menus was written just to support what is already realized there, and does not have scalability in mind, which means that I cannot directly copy said code, as I want to be able to expand on the original game.

So far the fundamental navigation within a menu and between menus is realized, as well as rudimentary code execution when interacting with the "buttons", even though there are no buttons visible yet. The menu toggle relies on variables that are separate from the game mode, which, in combination with the pause, allows me to bring up the menu in the middle of the game without fully swapping the game from fun mode to button array mode.

At this point the menu functionality is very raw, and I plan to bring it up to snuff for the next entry.