Cool things #1, Seamless Ritona Menu (Patreon)

Big post.

Mechanically, MS2b is pretty simple game. You collect a few items here and there and carry a battery that you can recharge to unlock things. There’s also a health meter that acts as a progress bar and a leg charm system that grants access to certain areas of the bar and map.

Even though the gameplay is fairly simple, that’s still a good number of data the player needs to reference at any given time. Rather than just cutting to a different screen with numbers and stats with a pretty flourish, we wanted a way to make an immersive menu that won’t detract from the atmosphere. I’ve always been a huge fan of seamless menu systems but it was always challenging to design. It turns out we weren’t wrong lol. This was way more complicated than it looks but the effort paid off.

Hopefully we can work on it more once we enter RC phase but we’re considering the menu system as beta quality. Time to move on till RC phase.

About beta and RC

We’ve adopted the typical 4 stage system at AiD.

 1. R&D: We test plugins, assets, materials, and research their integration into the software side of MS2b. Sometimes they work right out of the box, sometimes they require a lot of tweaking, sometimes it’s DOA. It’s a lot of brainstorming and testing things.

 2. Alpha: We get the basics working. This phase is not public and isn’t shared with Patrons because it’s too crude and boring to showcase.

 3. Beta: At this stage, it’s presentable to the public, though not fully polished. The Ritona Menu System is now what we would call “beta”, and we believe it’s ready to show to Patrons.

 4. RC (Release Candidate): This is where we will keep polishing things in order of feasibility but not many things have reached this level yet. We a majority of the game to be in this stage when we announce a release date on a game.

We are now focusing on the visual side of things as tick off all the endless amount of behind-the-scenes tasks. These visual elements are gradually entering the beta phase, so we should be able to showcase more as they are completed.

Feel free to leave us a comment if you have any questions.

Thanks for your continued support and we hope you all have a great weekend!

-Munisix + AiD team