Infiltrator Part 35 - Here is the Menu

I absolutely hate creating GUI's and menu's. I also love it. I'm awesome like that, so this is the session in which I've tackled the task of creating Infiltrator's menu system.

orange, green, black, and blue

Some animation work in Blender allowed me to create some pretty cool looking abstract circuit animations in the background. In case you haven't already figured it out, the color scheme of Infiltrator is largely based on combinations of green, orange, black, and blue. I am aware that none of these are technical complements except for orange and blue, but I like the look of green and orange. This actually works out really well in the menu. See, orange and blue are complements, making the orange box representing the current set of menu options stand out against the blue circuit backdrop. Then I drop the saturation and brightness for the green buttons, giving it a sort of alien look and making the pure white button labels stick out. All of this was the fun part.

After I had done all of the art and design, the time came to implement my menu in source code. I'm not using any GUI library. I understand that a lot of my work here is reinventing the wheel, but I want to. I took this project on for the fun and learning involved, not for practicality. I played things kind of smart, but still got stuck in a lot of places. In the end I had things in a workable state. The only effective menu selections ATM are new game, options, and exit. I'm still trying to make the options menu work properly, but that shouldn't take too long... Right?

You may have noticed that my push to complete enemies has stopped. Infiltrator is currently at version 0.0.74, or pre-alpha rev74. That means that we're 74% to the first alpha, version, 0.1. I'm throttling back on the enemies to dedicate more time to cleaning up code, fixing bugs, and getting those incidental little features in place. I'll be doing things like that until pre-alpha 80. Between 0.0.80 and somewhere in 0.0.9x I'll be setting up the Assault Master and Heavy Warrior enemies. Then I'll use the remaining version numbers to split up my goals for 0.1.

So things are getting somewhat exciting now. Yay.

        --LazerBlade