Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Note that all of these elements (the logo, the menu buttons, and so forth) are separate images.
We get an immediate advantage by starting with the main menu screen: we can directly derive
more screens from the interactive components. In Mr. Nom's case, we will need a game screen,
a high-scores screen, and a help screen. We get away with not including a settings screen since
the only setting (sound) is already present on the main menu screen.
Let's ignore the game screen for a moment and concentrate first on the high-scores screen. We
decided that high scores will be stored locally in Mr. Nom, so we'll only keep track of a single
player's achievements. We also decided that only the five highest scores will be recorded. The
high-scores screen will therefore look like Figure
3-16
, showing the “HIGHSCORES� text at the
top, followed by the five top scores and a single button with an arrow on it to indicate that you
can transition back to something. We'll reuse the background of the playing field again because
we like it cheap.
Figure 3-16.
The high-scores screen
Next up is the help screen. It will inform the player of the backstory and the game mechanics.
All of that information is a bit too much to be presented on a single screen. Therefore, we'll split
up the help screen into multiple screens. Each of these screens will present one essential piece
of information to the user: who Mr. Nom is and what he wants, how to control Mr. Nom to make
him eat ink stains, and what Mr. Nom doesn't like (namely eating himself). That's a total of three
help screens, as shown in Figure
3-17
. Note that we added a button to each screen to indicate
that there's more information to be read. We'll hook those screens up in a bit.
