So, tonight I took some time to mash up some graphics for my game menu screen. My artistic talent sucks...but here goes nothing...voila, my menu screen!!

The Menu Screen

The screen above is displaying 4 sprites, even though it looks like maybe 7...

I guess one of the first things for me to test in the future is ... is it more memory efficient (and better frame rate) to draw one big background image OR tp paint the screen black, and place each sprite in set locations?

To display the 4 sprites above, I borrowed my code from yesterday ... I know, tacky, but...I wanted to see it, feel it. Do you feel it? FEEL IT! (homer voice & shakes fist)

Note: the menu items won't scale properly as it stands with this code, well pretty much they do nothing except look pretty...

Paint.Net & Google Fun

So how did I create that image above? Well, to create the background and 3 menu items I used Paint.Net. Basically, I scoured Google images for: a stone doorway, a stone pillar, an old book, a wizards hat, and...that's it pretty much it! I'll let you type in those searches and see if you can locate the images I used.

I know, bad developer...but I figured since I modified the images considerably it doesn't count...well for a personal project it shouldn't count...*shrug*

Anyhow, I extracted each key assest I wanted from each image and applied lots of matting, blurring, color changes, glow effects and such. Then, using my vivid imagination I placed / composed each of the layered assets into the mashed up the "scene" above. Pretty cool, eh?

Hey, did you know, the cool mist effect is actually a fire rendition in Paint.net? I set it to black & white with opacity set next to nothing. I'm also very proud of the yellow "light" in the stone doorway. I drew that in and then applied gausian blur to it to give it the effect of light creeping out around the door and into the room...heheh.

So did I achieve the dark, mysterious ritual as I stated in my design doc? I think I had a great stab at it!

Maybe down the road I can get a real artist to crank out some quality graphics for the game... =)

So, What's Next?

Well, I don't have that animated brazier yet...however, I thought it would be even cooler if I can get that door pulsing that yellow light and it would be extremely cool to have the smoke / mist moving across the screen! Make the creative ideas stop!! (clutches head) haha!

I'm having great fun working on this project =) I recommend others giving something like this a try, it's really fulfilling.

OK. Tomorrow... I think I'm going to start creating some game / menu objects as per the design doc, maybe even get a custom mouse cursor up on the screen and handle a couple of mouse events, and lastly, maybe a feature to toggle a framerate display...

D.