Welcome to Camp, Private.
Cycle 2 – Week 11
After not updating this site for seven weeks, I'm finally back with another report.
I have no good excuse for missing so many weeks. I've just been lazy and forgetful, plain and simple. These last few weeks, I've been suffering a sort of burnout and task paralysis. I had just finished a significant system for the game, and we were getting ready to start on an entirely new section. Standing before the main menu's blank slate, I froze up and didn't know where to start.
What part do I work on first? What method am I going to use? Should I make it 2D or 3D? And so on. This and a whining interest in the project brought us to a standstill for multiple weeks. Not to mention the mounting school work and all the stress that brings, it all resulted in me spending a lot of time and not getting much stuff done.
Over the last two weeks, I've slowly gotten things moving again. I am working on the game in small doses and getting it done gradually. Now, I have finally completed the game's main menu. Its all-placeholder assets and layout are subject to change, but I am finally happy with the system I used and the design idea I implemented for the menu.
This menu design might be familiar to anyone who's played old PC games or liked to pursue the extras on DVDs. While I can't name any of them outright, I do know this style of a 3D environment that you physically move around to access the menu's various screens was used a lot in older software made for kids. Extrapolating the abstract idea of adjusting values on a screen and putting it in a 3D space helped people understand what was happening. While the need to give digital interactions real-world equivalents is not required in this kind of game, I found the aesthetic fitted well for the theme I'm trying to build.
While it's hard to tell with the simple white-box environment, the menu takes place on a military base, with you moving to various base departments as you prep to race. You start in reception, where you select if you're playing single or multiplayer, move to the war-room room to select your game mode, head outside to the garages to select your tank, and finally head to the briefing room to choose your map. The sequence of moving through the base tells a micro story of a soldier getting ready for deployment, and I'm super happy to have designed this into a simple menu system.
