Start menu

This is just a minor thing when it comes to creating PATOU, but of course it has some importance: The start menu is the first thing people will see from a game (apart from the 50 company logo animations, of course) and therefore set expectations. There are games with very beautiful menu screens with a lot of animations going on, for example Dishonored, and I always find they enhance the overall quality of the experience somehow.

For Patou I chose to go the same way as with TRI back then (at least for now), which means that I load one of the game scenes and position the camera at some nice angle, maybe even animate it a bit. The hard part about this approach is that there usually are scripts in such a scene that rely on parts only present when the game is running, for example the player character. Thankfully it’s easy to identify such code and add “safe guards” or remove the script automatically.

I chose to put some time into the start menu at this point because we already show the game at meet-ups (and soon the A MAZE), and the start screen is what’s running when nobody is playing PATOU. So it should be somewhat attractive. Until now all we had was Kit running on an infinite path, only that her feet accidentally weren’t animated so it looked like she would be dancing.

The current version of the start screen, as seen in the header of this blog post, uses the first level at a fixed camera position. Later this will be a bit more dynamic, and maybe Kit and/or the dog will appear too.