This week all the groups presented their alpha builds. It was an exhausting experience to sit through around 20 presentations. But, thankfully, I didn’t leave that torture chamber without some insight about our own game.
in Game Design, you are always warned about how you will probably never get to build your own concept. But when a concept isn’t perfect, it allows you to pull at one loose string and unravel the whole thing into a lose pile of idea. You can reconstruct the concept from those ideas into something that is now in fact your creation. And that is what we did in my team; we took a wide, unclear world and reinvented it our own way. This allowed us to create a clear narrative for our game, which I think a lot of presentations lacked, as they followed the concept documents without much remaking. So why am telling this? Because I want to show you two sketches of our game menu. The reason for why there are two of them depends on how much of the rest of the game we can produce. And both menus have some narrative value.
Menu sketch number 1
In this one I tried to depict the crystal tree and its surroundings to give the player a better feeling of the world. It shows the structure of the tree and environment that is both beautiful and desolate. This is the menu I want for our game if we have time to make several art pictures that also introduce the player to our main character and the beginning of her journey. But this is a time-consuming process that is heavy on the artists and I am not all too sure they can manage this in time. So, we also need plan B for the menu.
Menu sketch number 2
In this one I wanted to have our avatar shown to the player as an introduction. The avatar is always facing away from the player in the game and that can make it hard for players to connect with her, especially since it’s a half-spider and arachnophobia is a real thing. So, if we can’t make scenes where we show the story of Betulla then we need, at least, to show the player her human side, how she gently touches the crystal, that she isn’t a monster you might think she is.
There is however a huge flaw in this approach – we leave the menu screen as the last thing for artists to make. If we can’t manage the story and must make a menu that shows Betulla, that is still a big chunk of work for the artists as this picture requires a lot of details on artistic level for it to connect with the player.
lostingame.design 
Hey Gleb! Just read your blog post and i must say it contains some good details about tying the narrative world and the menu together, however as i will assume that the blog is about visual representation of the worlds narrative in the menu screen i have to note that it was not very clear from the start. I would recommend having your title or first segment tell the reader what this blog post is about early.
Leaving that aside i think you have some great explenations of how you can work with the menu to add this flavour to the game. I also like that you had two different plans just in case something would be an issue with the first, it was also explained well how you wanted to represent the players character so it would feel gentle and more human. Maybe you could have something representing the player in the first menu sketch as well.
That said, overall despite a little unclear start i enjoyed the idea you presented and how you wanted to achieve it. Good luck with the project!
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