Escape to Menu
Endeavour: triangle
This post relates to triangle , an arcade, ARPG, factory game I’m working on.
One of the key bits of functionality I want in a sprout build is the pause menu.
After a bit of working it out, I ended up with this plan:
Until now, hitting Escape would just exit the game immediately. Not ideal. triangle needed a proper menu: something that pauses the game, gives players a chance to resume or quit intentionally, and maybe even shows a bit of useful info.
So that’s what I’ve been building. The menu now:
- Pops up when Escape is pressed (as long as no panels are open).
- Pauses the game,
- Shows a few buttons: Resume, Quit, Contact, and Config Path
Ordering
At first, I was a bit confused as to why I was not able to see the menu. I was under the (mistaken) impression that dvui would always draw last.
Once I switched things around to always draw dvui at the end, I could see the menu.
Pause/Resume
Since we use the frame time to determine how much time has passed, pausing was simply a case of setting that time elapsed to zero.
In fact, it skips the update call altogether. One thing I noticed while I was
doing that was that the camera movement code happened in render. While there
is a particular logic to that, it’ll need to be moved to update (later), at
which point, render will also not require the elapsed time.
Resume was simply a case of letting “time flow” again.
Logging
I thought logging might be useful — but writing to file or supporting runtime filtering requires a custom log handler. While it’s probably doable, I didn’t want to dive into it just yet. For now, I’ve left it out entirely. Maybe a separate debug build is the better option anyway.
Contact
I set up a form at tally.so and ChatGPT helped me write a tiny bit of code that opens a browser to that form.
I’ve not tested this on Mac/Windows and would appreciate any feedback (when a sprout build is available.)
Quit
We now have a quit button that will quit the game. The game will also currently
quit if you hit q. I’ll unmap this later.
Config path
The config location is also displayed. The path can be selected and copied - so that the player can navigate there easier to be able to override controls etc.
Final
While perhaps not as pretty as the sketch (credit is more to tldraw than me), it is functional.
Next steps are to get a dialog working with some basic information, including a changelog and possibly a roadmap.