Getting ready to get set and relax... Or at least that is the aim of Comfort Squad as development begins in earnest for this Graded Unit for my HND in games design.

This game is for an arcade cabinet and it had me thinking about what is it that attracts people to playing a game on one of these devices, what is it that draws a person in amongst a sea of machines all looking to take your coin and aim to be the most popular machine. Parts of this are the gameplay clips, the what you could be doing when playing this game. But the other is the menu and the music, something that gives that great first experience that you can catch over another players shoulder when they first start playing that game. It is with that in mind that I decided to start at the very beginning and make a functional main menu for Comfort Squad as can be seen below!

This is a menu that went through a few iterations, working out what would draw people in with the theme and environment, an eye-catching logo that reinforced design principles to help players know what they are doing when standing at the cabinet. The intention was to copy 80's / 90's Saturday morning cartoons, where the logo was always a large component of the screen space of a title with characters taking up usually another 1/3 of the frame. While there are no characters on this, having the logo be on the left and 1/2 of the screen space should quickly catch and draw the eye to hopefully have people select this game to play.

Coupled with some suiting 80's music courtesy of Incompetech, this should be a good introduction to those stepping up to the game.