Indie Game // UX Design

I set to work designing the navigation menus for the game. Taking inspiration from classic homescreens and the simplicity of the UIs of modern indie games, I wanted to produce something which was visually clean but really emphasised the style of the game. Looking at other games, I decided that we would only need a few options: Continue, New game, Help & Options, Credits and Exit.

We wanted to use our pixel typeface for all of the menu/option screens so I extracted the letters and laid out the list of options. I was inspired by the Super meat Boy screen, which has a simple list of options on the right and is charcter-heavy on the left, so wanted to explore what I could do with this structure.

The main character looked washed out against the gradient sky we use in the game, and just generally a bit lost in the size of the screen. I decided that I would have to break proportions and increase the size. I liked how the rectangulardialogue box looked as an indicator of which option had been selected, and thought that this could look better if applied to other character colour schemes.

Taking one of the ground tiles from a background we had designed, I created a layout that would work using the colours of any character. Every time the player moves up or down the list, a new character would be displayed and the menu colour would change appropriately. I tested this a few times and was pleased with the results. I had to centrally align the list however as it allowed the selector to stay at fixed width without looking out of place.