For this "Shoot 'Em Up" game jam prompt, our group decided to make a game where you play as an exterminator going into the sewers to tame the increasingly bad rat problem. As you do, the rats become increasingly strange with some of them in boats, planes or even mechanical suits.

This game had two coders working on it, as a result the code work was split between the two of us. We decided to make the game in Unity, an engine I have not used before, however, the other developer was very experienced in it. Because of this, the workload was split so that I would do the more beginner friendly tasks as the other coder had massively more experience than me. This resulted in my task being the Game Menu and Pause screen.

Menu Design

The First iteration of the menu. Each button changes colour when hovered over and when clicked.

At this point, the buttons change colour when hovered and clicked, but they do not do anything once clicked. Therefore, a C# code was needed to link the buttons to new scenes. I created two placeholder scenes (one for play and one for options) and added them to a hierarchy of scenes.

using System.Collections;
        using System.Collections.Generic;
        using UnityEngine;
        using UnityEngine.SceneManagement;
        
        public class MainMenu : MonoBehaviour
        {
            public void PlayGame()
            {
                SceneManager.LoadSceneAsync("test1"); //Loads next scene
                Debug.Log("PLAY GAME!");
                //SceneManager.LoadScene(SceneManager.GetActiveScene().buildIndex + 1); //Loads next scene
            }
        
            public void GameOptions()
            {
                Debug.Log("OPTIONS MENU");
                SceneManager.LoadScene(SceneManager.GetActiveScene().buildIndex + 2);
                //SceneManager.LoadSceneAsync("Options");
            }
        
            public void QuitGame()
            {
                Debug.Log("QUIT GAME!");
                Application.Quit();
            }
        }        
        

Then using this, a C# code needed a function for each button which called the new scene. This can be done in two ways as shown by the code above. In the end I used the hierarchal way of calling them as the scenes I were using were place holders and so it made more sense to reference them by build index so we wouldn't have to change the code when linking it to the other coders work as long as it was in the same place in the build index.

Once coded, this needs to be linked to the buttons themselves. Therefore it is attached to the MainMenu game object that the buttons are in. Then, it is dragged into OnClick() in the button and the appropriate function is called for each button. This resulted in A fully working menu that changed the scene on a button press.

Reflection

On reflection, this was a good way to ease myself into Unity, and coding C# for the first time. It helped me to learn the syntax of C# so that in future I would have a good understanding of the basic syntax of the language meaning less syntax errors in future. This will help me to more easily create more complicated code in future.