Start Screen

Experiments in space…

Every game begins with a start screen where you log in, choose your character, pick a server and go. Most have flashy background art, some exciting music to set the tone of the game, and the standard menu options. VR gives you so many options that it’s hard to choose, but for the first release we decided to follow the tried and tested route. Except in virtual space.

I just want to stop for a moment and point out how daunting it is to build in virtual space for the first time. If you’ve taken the leap and bought VR, you’ve probably played a few demos and games set in pre-constructed environments. I went from total noobie to building within a week. Would not recommend. I purchased several sky spheres and jumped straight in, not realising how enormous it would feel. I then spent the next hour trying to navigate in an area the equivalent size of 20 football pitches. Which was also dark. Because why make it easy?

One of our devs then joined in and we spent several hours creating objects, losing them in the void, experimenting with gravity, and trying different menu ‘screen’ options. The below is our decided layout.

Our menus will be wrapped around a giant invisible wall that surrounds the player when they log into the game. We quickly realised that curved menus are far easier to read than the regular flat version you get in non-VR games. There is a scientific reason that we will explain in more detail in a future post. But our main reasoning was ‘this looks better’ when trying the curved version.