I find minimalist and simple design patterns to be the best look for things like icons and logos.

As for my studio logo, I contracted work out to an international who quoted me $18 an hour to create my logo. I already had some design ideas in my head that we had discussed prior to him starting work on it, and once the contract was signed between us, the guy was finished in just about 40 minutes and was sending me the file.

I'm not saying that they should all be priced liked that and work so quick, but it earned him a spot as a valued artist on my contact list that has gotten repeat service from me.

I personally, so no offence, feel that the work I see above isn't quite at the level for the price you request...but it's not that bad either.

Some suggestions I would have is to create more original icons to show us what you are capable of.

Here are some for inspiration that really kinda fit the look and feel that I think iconography is going these days:

Icons

My Studio Logo

I am definitely interested in bringing you on board to my project, but I would like to completed a few more thing before I start paying for art assets.

Question, think you are capable enough to be an art lead if necessary?

OlivierC

Great post and some excellent ideas. I will be experimenting more with how I want things to work but I may just incorporate some of those methods that you mentioned. I too am trying to make the menu very user friendly and an experience that is both pleasant and relevant to the game.

One piece of advice I would give is to add a local variable that is set to 1 when a menu button is pushed. Then as a condition of pressing a button, make it so that variable needs to be 0. This just overcomes a lot of issues like touching underlying buttons or two at a time. Then also/instead use 'pick top' if using a button family.

And if your menus get really complicated with a lot of things overlapping and remaining on-screen, I use a text variable that defines which group of buttons are active (purchase, equipment, etc.).

I already use your original suggestion, and thanks for the others! Good thoughts. I don't have very complex menus yet, but they will become that way in due course.

I just wanted to guage some of your brains to get a basic overview of the flow you use to create ingame menus. Things like clicking a computer screen and having it come up with a menu that is interactive without going to another layout.

Im experimenting with keeping things in layers now and I'm having relatively good success, just wanted to hear some of your suggestions.

While I thik it'd be a good feature, I'd hope for it to be a preference or an option. I work off a flash drive and saves can be somewhat lengthy sometimes, and it could be irritating if I just needed a quick preview of something specific.

I totally agree that it should be set by the user in preferences as to whether they want this feature activated or not.

Well I was using 139. Then I upgraded to 143, and now I'm upgraded to 144.2 and it has happened in all of those versions. This is why I was wondering if it was Windows 8.1 by any chance. My GFX drivers are up to date, so I don't think it could be that.

OK, so now the system crashes on occasion even when I save. This crashing is getting a bit out of hand. I'm running Windows 8.1 if it makes a difference.

So I am making a menu that pops out from the side of the screen using layers. My question are:

For each button on the menu, is it better to have each of them be their own object with only 2 frames for unclicked/clicked, or have all the buttons on the menu in one object that has all of the clicked/unclicked frames inside it?

I ask because I am using the second method of having them all inside 1 object and it is proving to be a bit difficult for me, but I wan to make the game as optimized as possible.

If you think the second option is the best way to go, then my second question is, how would you handle changing the animation frame of each IID of the buttons? I can'r seem to figure out how to change specific object instances to different frames, they all go to the same frame.

I'm not going to lie, I sometimes get so concentrated in what I am doing that while trying to work out a kink in my project, I often forget the simple action of hitting CTRL+S to save my work. This isn't a problem in most programs, but in C2, well...I've have my few shares of crashes, and they almost always seem to happen when I decide to forget a while. I have lost a good bit of work several times now, and it's kind of a bummer every time it happens.

My question is, do you think auto-saving you project each time the preview button is hit is a worthwhile idea? I ask because I may forget to save often, but I sure do hit the preview button quite a bit, so if there was an option to allow the project to save when preview was hit that would be amazing.

Also, I'm not saying that having not saved for a while is causing the crashes, I have no idea what causes them and they are not easily repeatable...they are quite random.

This is excellent and so many points hit right on the nose!

That definitely did have some elements im thinking of implementing. Thanks!