Main menu click reduction
Posted: Sat Apr 20, 2013 12:49 am
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.
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.