Cargo menu

This week I’ve finished a surprisingly important menu for Super Space Galaxy. Until now, you could collect Resources on planets, but the only way to drop them was to sell them in a city. Now, after a lot of work, it’s finally done!

Planning the new menu raised a litany of game-design questions. How many other new menus might I need? Could you view all the menus at once, or would it be one at time? How would you access all these menus? How would they relate to the weapon-switching menu that I’d already made? As usual, I made a lot of written notes to work things out.

I wanted the menu to be dynamic and efficient, so I came up with a system where it’d choose the best number of icons to represent your cargo in a rectangle of icons. If you had only one type of item, it’d show only one icon to minimize having to move through the menu.

Once I’d made this, though, I realized how confusing that could be. When you pick up an item in the world, you’re shown how many of your 20 cargo slots are filled. It was odd to open your cargo menu and be shown, say, one piece of fruit with a ’20’ next to it when that didn’t match how your inventory was presented elsewhere. It was easy to change the menu’s system to count out each item and give it its own icon, but it did mean sacrificing some work I was proud of on the old system. Now you can clearly see how the cargo menu corresponds to the cargo overview you’re shown in gameplay. This also means the display is more intuitive. Instead of having, say, one fruit icon with a ’20’ under it, I can simply have 20 fruit icons, which is a much more obvious way of showing quantity.

The menu might look simple, but I actually put a lot of work into making it really intuitive and fun to use. It can be used with keyboard, mouse or gamepad, and you can even press the End and Home keys to move around in the menu. It’s something I never really see in games, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it.

Even when you could drop items, there was one last design issue to fix. At first, I had the ship throw items out in random directions, but this created a ring of items that could be annoying to fly past without picking up one of the items you just dropped. It felt like a threat to fly away after dumping your cargo. The fix was simple: the cargo is now dropped behind you, so you’ll only pick it back up if it’s deliberate.

This might all sound rather belaboured, but decisions like this are important to communicating things to players. Making my last game, Super Space Slayer 2, I saw first-hand how you must communicate things very clearly to players to give them a seamless experience. I know that putting the work into mundane features like menus will all add up to making Super Space Galaxy the best game it can be.

Thanks for reading,

Kenneth Dunlop