I learnt a lot from 'Gaggle Brains', one major thing, is I suck at GUI, the menus were visually messy and hard to manage in editor, I needed a better way to go about doing them. So Yesterday I sat down to make a simple, easy to handle menu system with clean presentation. 

First the buttons, I made a extension to the default GUI button script, to play sounds when it is selected or pressed, along with some other extra visual effects. 

Then I made a GUIManager. I would have one of these in the each scene and they would store settings for GUI to reference, like what the buttons sounds and colours should be, and what Menu is currently open. It would also make sure a button was always selected when any of the navigation buttons were pressed. This was brought up in 'Gaggle Brains' build review, that controllers would sometimes have nothing to select so this is my solution to that.

 Finally I made a MenuPages script, that would handle how the page would pop in and out, and what that pages default button was. The GUIManager would call these to open or close, and make sure only one page was open at a time, to prevent overlap.

This approach is simple, each bit is relatively self contained, and gives me a easy central point to control the presentation settings for all my scenes GUI. Honestly sitting down and finally hashing this out is worth it, it's going to make my future games so much easier to get up and running.

That's it for the now, got the tools so today I'll get on with setting up all the menu pages for the public demo. Honestly think I should do a 2min video on this some time, 'How To  Design Your Overall Menu System' or something because it took me way too long to come up with something simple that just worked!

30th April 2021 Development Notes: 

• Made a extension to GUI button to allow for sound, more visual effects and can get it's colours to use from a central reference.
• Made GUIManager script that stores settings for GUI presentation and also handles open pages and button selection.
• Made Simple MenuPages script  with option for nice transitions in and out effect.

Future Task:

• Make all menu pages for in game for demo.
• Make main menu page for demo.
• Get  mob spawning ready for demo.
• Make main character art for big dino and set it up to work with the rig for demo.
• Make Trees knockable.