Menus and fonts!

Hello again and welcome back to my blog!

This week I took a break from animations, mostly because we are done with all the animations for the game. We also noticed that we could get done with all the art and graphics for the game if we just did a bit more work then what  we usually during a during a week. So I and Nils decided that we were going to finish all the art this week so we can sit the next 4 weeks and polish the art that we have. This meant that I had to sit down and make all the menus for our game.

The first thing I had to do was find a font for the title of our game and a font for the menus. There are two really good websites for free fonts, they are: www.dafont.com and www.1001freefonts.com. I can really recommend this if you need to find good fonts for any project. One thing that you have to be careful about is to read what the artist says about using his/her fonts.

This is dafont.com

This is from 1001freefonts.com

I downloaded a few different fonts and installed them into Photoshop. I then started to play around with different fonts and colors for the title of our game. After deciding on a font for the title I started looking for a new font for the menu bottoms because I wanted the title font to stand out from the rest of the menu text. This didn’t take too long because I had a few ideas from looking for fonts for the title.

This is the font i used for our tite, it is called Bomb font

This is the font i used for the buttons, it is a version of Bomb font. I have added the color my self

The next step was to find a good color that could work well with the background and our aesthetic goals. What I did first was just keep everything white, this was because I wanted it to be simple and easy to see and understand. Though one of the bad things about this is that it becomes a bit boring and not kind to the eyes that are looking at it as my group told me when I showed it to them. So then I started playing around with different reds and shading. After working with a red I liked and trying to shade it in different ways I decided that maybe it would look better if I just trashed the shading idea, so I did but then the red I had chosen wasn’t as good anymore so I was back at looking at different reds I could use. I finally found one I liked thanks to a friend that gave me feedback while I was working.

This is how the main menu looks. please forgive the spelling mistake in the title.

The layout of the actual menu wasn’t that hard to make because we didn’t have a lot to put in them I wanted the text to be big and easy to se. This is also why I chose to put the text in the middle of the screen. It was rather easy to make the other menus after I had done the first because I had everything need and I just needed to copy it with the things that needed to be in that menu. I did run in to a pit of a pickle when I came to our high score screen because I saw that the font I had chosen didn’t have numbers. So I went back and looked for some but didn’t really find anyone that I liked a lot so I just took one as a placeholder for the moment.

main menu

High Score

Game Over

Pause

Options

What I still have to do now is to make a better background for the Game over screen (I have not done the backgrounds for the menus), animation for when a thing is selected and one when it is been chosen, and finally check all the coordinates so the programmers know. I have already started thinking about how I want the animations to be but I will not go into that in this blog post.

So in till next week!