What's this article all about?Most MMF/CNC/KnP/TFG games lack option menus, or options in there option menus. For some people this can be annoying, or degrade from gameplay.
I'm not saying that option menus add a lot to a game, but they are a nice touch. I will go over how to make em, and some cool options you can add into your games.
Options: Interface
1)Don't make things confusing. Use boxes to seperate groups of options, or use a system. You don't want to line up your options as shown:
Easy/medium/hard
Sound on/off
Music on/off
_____________
Lighting
_____________
Character type
Something like this.
2)utilize buttons, slider bars, graphics, text boxes, ect.
If there is a volume adjuster play a sound effect while adjusting the volume so people can preview how loud it is. If you are adjusting the amount of snow, show a screenshot with a mini display of the amount of snow. It makes things look very attractive. Also, it's very cool when buttons and things fly in the screen to create the options menu as with any menu. Try it out.
Options: Basic Options
Now I am going to go over how to create some very basic options you can add to your games. Usually, the options screen should be one of the last things made in your games, and you will have to go back and sift through the code and add lots of global values, and varying degrees of things.
Lets say you want to make it so less particles appear throughout your entire game. Go to all the events which create particles and incorporate a global value into them. For example, if you have an event set to shoot so many stars in a sky use your global variable. This way slower computers will have an easier time if the user adjusts it that way. The Global variable can be adjusted by a slider bar in the options menu.
You can also use global variables to create varying degrees of effects. Easy/Medium/Hard is the easiest to explain in this case. Most MMF games do not have an Easy/Medium/Hard setting available. That is because it can be very hard to implement.
You have to pick areas of your game which you can make harder. There are two ways of doing this, and they can be combined.
A)Have enemies do more damage , and start out with less health, ect. when it's harder(Number method). Simply make it so that when a global value is set to 3(for hard) the health is set to less, enemies deal more damage, ect. Perhaps extra levels is also a possiblity.
B)Create more enemies, and harder bosses, ect. (Creation method). The option menus lets you set the game to Easy/Medium/and Hard. On Easy a particular level has 2 enemies. But lets say you set it to hard(which sets a global variable to 3 for hard). Now at the start of the frame when Global variable=3 it will create 6 enemies thus making the game much harder.
There are lots of things you can implement these techniques in:
Particle amount
easy/medium/hard
Game Speed/character speed
Amount of detail(although this is EXTREMELY hard/tedious in MMF)
beginning money
initial health
Acceleration, deceleration, ect.
Ammo clip size
starting weapon/ect.
Hard Options to implement
The list I just made is of options that are fairly easy to add to games if you know what your doing. Below I will go through some of the more tricky or things you probably wouldn't think of that you can put in your options menu and game.
Screenshot Take: Every __ seconds. Have a checkbox and number edit box let people select an interval for taking screenshots and saving them somewhere.
Tray Icon: you will have to use the tray icon object, but Display tray icon, or don't?
Shutdown: you will need the system shutdown object, have your program shut down the computer after so many minutes or under certain conditions.
Visibility of objects: Perhaps making the health bar invisible could make for an interesting game for some people....
Auto Update: to auto update, or not to auto update...
Hide/Show application menu/
Windows object: full screen or windowed?
Configuration of keys
Final Note
I hope this article was informative, or at the very least gave you a good idea. It's pretty basic I know, but informative at the very least.
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