There’s still a lot of work to go, but this is a good benchmark. When the menu is called, the white outline bites in like teeth and the background fades black to a certain degree. The arrow jumps right, the text changes color and the tattoos on the buttons move when the button is highlighted. Even the background bar has a shine that scrolls up.

One of the greatest hurdles was finding a way around the surface transparency issue where any alpha between 100% and 0% would destroy anything previously drawn beneath it such as the blue bars in this case. Instead of a traditional fade from white to invisible, I went for a 90s style dithering where it’s either 100% opaque or 100% transparent. This solved a lot of headaches with the limitations for surface transparency. The other tricky part was getting the tattoos to scroll within the confines of the buttons. So a mask was used in a surface for the buttons.

As mentioned before it’s still a work in progress since it needs the buttons on the right side. The small font needs its own font to look less garbled. Even the big font looks a bit garbled as it has different sizes for whatever reason. It would probably look better if the pointer jumped from item to item rather than just disappearing and reappearing on the new item.

The sad part is that this is just the pause menu. The positive is that the typical menu still looks good even if it’s less colorful. All other menus of the game use the original menu system.

Hopefully someone out there likes the new blue menu.