Onto The Menu

But before I touch on post-handeling of the menu, let's look at what the menu looked like in the first iteration of the game! We spent a lot of time to make the menu look foreboding. The backdrop you see is actually the top of the Alchemist’s tower, and you can see the Philosophers Stone light up in the background.

When you press the Story Mode button, you can see the Alchemist enter from the right side of the screen, so the menu also acts as the first frame of the intro cinematic. We thought this to be a more interesting way to introduce the game.

Funfact: I don’t know if anyone has noticed yet, but when you’ve unlocked the Philosopher’s Stone, the environment in the main menu changes.

Elements

Let’s look at what’s on the menu here. The sounds that we use here are provided by Aleksander Vinter(Savant) who’s both sounds and music are a main feature of the game. We also wanted the logo to be a very prominent on this screen, because one of our goals was to promote Savant properly.

To the bottom left, you'll see a couple of buttons that we added after the game was released, options and achievements buttons. We ended up adding these, because of the sheer number of requests from players. The game was originally displayed in 1024x768, with no options to change this. When we released on Steam, we realized quickly that we had to add widescreen 1920x1080 support, even though we lacked a lot of assets to do so. We spent a lot of time after release to make sure that the game felt modern to the players.

Funfact: An achievement feature was in such high demand on Steam, that we were getting negative reviews left and right when we didn't have by release. We added achievements as fast as we could, and the reviews quickly turned around! Today Savant - Ascent is reviewed at a 'Very Postive' - 94% score by over 2.000 players on Steam. We're very happy with the results of our post-development.