The main menu as a narrative tool
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Friendship Down’s original concept document provides basic narrative direction: while on a peaceful mission, the crew of the spacefaring vessel The Friendship is abruptly attacked by a hostile alien race. The crew (a squad of friends) is forced to abandon their ship using escape pods, and then land on an unfamiliar world where they must fend off their attackers and find a means of escaping the planet. This basic storyline was intended to be communicated through an introductory cutscene, showing the crew moving into the escape pods. In the pre-production phase of development, considering the SCRUM-methodologies, these cutscenes were considered desirable, yet of low-priority, because narrative cutscenes are non-essential to achieving Friendship Down’s aesthetic goals. Regardless, including a basic storyline would positively improve the game, as it would aid players in placing the gameplay into context. Considering this, I attempted to include whatever narrative I could when working on high-priority tasks. This manifested itself best in my assignment of designing the main menu screen. The main menu is an in medias res freeze-frame of the player character’s point of view from inside the escape pod, right before launching onto the planet’s surface. This setting was chosen for its ability to communicate various story-hints to the player. Most notably, the main menu artwork shows a chaotic scene with aggressive siren-lights inside the escape pod, and a tumultuous battle outside its window. This was intended to communicate the antagonist, aggressive nature of the attacking aliens. This combined with having the point of view placed in the main character’s perspective as they stand in an escape pod (which is explicitly stated on the blue monitor, see image) implies that the player character is not the aggressor.
Furthermore, the main menu artwork provides some foreshadowing: the player character’s silhouette is shown on the monitor, giving the player some notion regarding the nature of their character while retaining some of the anticipation of finding out. Lastly, a launched escape pod is seen in the distance descending towards the planet. This detail is meant to highlight the fact that there are other survivors, introducing the friendship theme of the game.
The value of designing the main menu in this way is that it takes a high-priority task (making the essential main menu is a thing that needs to be done for the product to be shippable) and shapes it in such a way that it could sufficiently compensate for the low-priority narrative cutscenes, should they need to be cut from development. This provides a solid baseline because it ensures that the product is, in terms of narrative, in a potentially shippable state, regardless of how cutscene development turns out.  |
