Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 3-17.
The help screens
Finally, there's our game screen, which we already saw in action. There are a few details we left
out, though. First, the game shouldn't start immediately; we should give the player some time
to get ready. The screen will therefore start off with a request to touch the screen to start the
munching. This does not warrant a separate screen; we will directly implement that initial pause
in the game screen.
Speaking of pauses, we'll also add a button that allows the user to pause the game. Once
it's paused, we also need to give the user a way to resume the game. We'll just display a big
Resume button in that case. In the pause state, we'll also display another button that will allow
the user to return to the main menu screen. An additional Quit button lets the user go back to
the main menu.
In case Mr. Nom bites his own tail, we need to inform the player that the game is over. We could
implement a separate game-over screen, or we could stay within the game screen and just
overlay a big “Game Over� message. In this case, we'll opt for the latter. To round things out,
we'll also display the score the player achieved, along with a button to get back to the
main menu.
Think of those different states of the game screen as subscreens. We have four subscreens:
the initial get-ready state, the normal game-playing state, the paused state, and the game-over
state. Figure
3-18
shows these subscreens.
