Welcome to Camp, Private.
Cycle 2 – Week 11
After a seven-week break, I'm excited to be back with another update!
I took some much-needed time to recharge, which, admittedly, led to a bit of a creative block. After completing a major system for the game, I found myself at a crossroads, unsure of where to begin on the new section. Faced with choices like whether to make it 2D or 3D, I needed a moment to regroup. Although it was a challenging period, balancing schoolwork and project decisions, I'm ready to move forward with renewed energy and enthusiasm.
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.
