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Main menu click reduction

Posted: Sat Apr 20, 2013 12:49 am
by Grolleter
As I understand it, there's an important principle in software development that says: Optimize for the common case. In other words, if you can implement something in one of two ways, and the first way makes things work better in situations that come up frequently while the second way makes things work better in situations that come up infrequently, then you should choose the first option.

When a player first starts up the game, I suspect that more often than not, they will want to access something in the "Play" submenu. So I think it would be an improvement to move some of the options from the "Play" submenu onto the main menu, and move some of the options that are currently on the main menu into submenus.

For instance, the main menu might have "Start Campaign", "New Game", "Load Game", "Custom", "Options", "About", and "Exit"; where "Custom" takes you to a submenu with "Custom Scenario", "Map Editor", and "Mods". I'm not quite sure where "Replay" would fit into this, and obviously there are lots of other possible configurations, but the main point is that (in my opinion) "Start Campaign", "New Game", and "Load Game" will be used frequently enough that they should be on the first menu screen that you see when you run the game.

Re: Main menu click reduction

Posted: Sat Apr 20, 2013 1:37 am
by FreeER
I almost hate to say it but this makes sense :) Of course when/if it happens I'm going to have to get used to it since I'm soo used to starting hitting play and then new game so if new game isn't the first option I'm going to be hitting the wrong button for a few days lol

Re: Main menu click reduction

Posted: Sat Apr 20, 2013 3:08 am
by Dakkanor
for the custom games also there should be a drop down of pre-set fields, including a custom field.
eg, normal, sparse resources, abundant resources ect, there are already options to stet these just none to quickly set it