Right at the onset of beginning the game, Sky’s identity needs to be chosen by the player. We have completed the menu for selecting which Sky will represent you throughout the game, and we’re now ready to share it with everyone!
The menu opens up with the player receiving a zoom in on both versions of Sky. This is achieved through some simple scaling and position manipulation. If you only scale the sprites, you only get the effect of the characters getting bigger; however, if you proportionately increase the distance between them and lower their position it appears as if you’re getting closer to them.
As they are zoomed in, our header sprite appears along with our two arrows. The arrow animations create the illusion of them quickly appearing in strokes due to the animation only being a few frames long. You may recognize the bouncy scaling animation of our header. This is a repurposed object from some of the previous menus that we have included in the game already.
Upon selecting a Sky, the corresponding arrow pulses shortly while the other arrow and the header reverse their appearance. The pulsing arrow then vanishes as the background star twirls into place. The selected Sky switches to a puppet animation and centers themself more on the screen. We then present a confirmation menu to the player.
Once again the confirmation window is made up of previous components from our existing menus. This time though, we save the entire confirmation menu to a texture. We then create a 3D plane with the menu texture we created applied. This allows us to turn the confirmation menu we created based on the Sky selected, and to also help the menu pop a little on the screen.
Upon selecting a Sky, the rest of the elements still visible on the screen close, and we are thrust into the game itself! Oh… But we aren’t ready to share that much with you yet. Next week though we will be sharing our event scenes with you. Make sure to follow us on Twitter to get updated as soon as the latest devlog is released. See you next week TerraZone fans!