Hello again folks, 'tis I Jon and this week we're going to take a look at the new menu system we've been working on. The whole idea behind the menus was to have them be as much a part of the world as possible instead of the more traditional method involving heavy use of 2D elements.
Why have we done this? Mainly because we feel that Lithic is all about the world, making the main menu out of the environment allows us to introduce players as we want them to head onward – examining their surroundings. The only UI overlay you'll see until you arrive at the character customisation screen will be tooltips explaining what your selections mean. This could have easily been done using traditional UI but we feel that doing it this way gives the player a much better introductory experience.
As for the menus themselves, they function much as normal menus: selecting options advances you to the next menu where you can make further choices etc. As the menus transition the pillars retract into the base and new options appear as they re-emerge. It's all very pretty and in my opinion embodies a bit of the mysterious feel we're going for with Lithic.
From the main menu you can start a new game or load a previous one, change options, the usual main menu stuff. You can currently have up to six tribes saved at a time, and you can export characters from one and import them into other tribes or even new ones. This allows you to carry favourite tribe members across games! I'm currently working on the character customisation HUD and when that's ready we'll showcase that on here, there are lots of sliders and you can play with and you can now customize your entire starting tribe – not just your Alpha as we had previously planned. This allows players to better target their tribe's playstyle to how they want to approach the game.
That's it for this week folks, I must get back to stomping bugs and designing UI. As always you can find us on our Forum, Facebook, Twitter and IndieDB. If you have any questions please feel free to fire them off to us at any of the above links where we'll be more than happy to answer them.
