Page one

I recently focused on the menu for the map view. Some things it needs to do: - give the player a sense of progress on the world -further the fantasy of being an evil overlord/ sorcerer -enable the player to view and select strategic actions

I planned out the menu design in powerpoint… I know it’s the ‘wrong tool for the job’ but I’m fast with PowerPoint, and can execute my thoughts quickly without the baggage of having to learn or navigate unfamiliar constraints. <protip: use whats familiar to move fast, don’t fret over the ‘correct’ tool for the job, the tool that gets it done is the right tool 😉 >

The first design I blocked out what needed to show up:

i started to feel a bit allergic to overload on the screen, and thought about how i can gate/ stagger the amount of info the player is seeing... After playing around with “Keep Driving” I enjoyed that games diegetic (car based) feeling menus, I decided to try out the concept that the menu was an actual spellbook:

this give me a way to stagger information by using pages, as well as giving me a better 'thematic canvas' to work with... I played with this a bit, and thought about the main information that the player would need to see in sequence. And it something like 

[world map]->player selects a hex->[hex overview]->player selects a mission->[mission overview]->player chooses to plan a mission->[mission planning]

I got stuck for a bit about how we resolve from planning to the action of a mission and return to the map view. I know that those two parts will be different game modes, I think I overthought this a bit. I'm just going to fade to black them go to combat (instead of giving the choice to watch or not). In future I plan to make it so player can launch ventures without needing to watch them.

When I got the flow down I made a state machine for the menu states, and set about adding all the various objects to be created at the right parts.

I worked on the a art a little, this work will probably be thrown away but I felt like it was helpful for me to see how it might look with a little bit of polish. I made the menu navigation to look like bookmarks sticking out of the book, I made a simple lerpy controller for placeholder hexes, and just hardcoded the text and images on top for now.

Overall im very happy with how its come together, the diegetic are there, I could make the book look a lot more evil and I should use a more suitable font. But all of the content is straightforward to polish and replace later on.