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[TheLastBanana]

I don't know if anybody else has this problem, but it's tough to make an aesthetically pleasing main menu while retaining its functionality.  There's just so much space to fill, I never know what to do with it all.
That said, it would be nice to see some examples of really good main menus for reference.  I suppose this could sort of become a hall of main menu fame or something, just to give some interesting ideas for menu design.
I'll start off:
I generally like menus that you can move your character around in, like in Fancypants Adventure or Spelunky.  It's kind of neat to be able to get a bit of a feel for the game before you've even started, and it's far more interesting than just moving a cursor or hitting buttons.  My one problem with it is that it doesn't always work - some more emotionally involving games need the player to be immersed while actually playing.

[JaJitsu]

Title screens are challenging.

I've had 2 for my game Jables's Adventure and I'm still not satisfied with it.

[oganalp]

I suggest studying advertisements and magazine covers. The idea there is similar to filling a menu screen. Composition elements are the key. You have to pick a fitting background / in game place for the menu to support the density and balance of the artwork.

I know, I am usually active over the music stuff over these forums but I am working at a graphical design company, actually owning it with a friend, so I am fairly used to creating such things.

What I can suggest is observing some of the AAA titles menu grounds and observing the "balance".

like Mass Effect II, Dragon Age, Freelancer, Witcher. Usually, its the background creating the foreground menu. You simply "balance" the background visual you have.

[Richard Kain]

What you are talking about is a straight-up art design issue. You could always just make your menu buttons incredibly large, but that is a cheap cop-out, and everyone knows it.

Personally, I've always preferred in-game graphic scenes over static art for menus. Static art is good for when the eye does not necessarily need to be drawn to it. Such as, screens where there is a lot of text. For menus, there is generally very little text, more often than not just on the main buttons. So for menus, I like to see little "scenes" from the game, possibly with animations or characters moving around.

As someone else pointed out, composition is key. How the menu screen is laid out, and how the various graphical elements balance against each other, that is what you should be paying attention to.

[AaronG]

There's always the Myst option: just have the program jump right into gameplay.  If the player wants to do something else (load another game, adjust settings) they use the pause menu.  Certainly not appropriate for every game but I thought it was worth mentioning.

[TheLastBanana]

I agree with gameplay in the background being nice, or at least some kind of dynamic scene.  I tend to like minimalist menus too, with a large image and buttons off to the side.  My one concern is that my game is a somewhat simple 2D puzzle game - gameplay wouldn't look great for a title screen in this case.
At this point, I'm thinking of making it look somewhat like a graphical operating system.  Your character spends the entire game at a control station, looking through cameras and controlling the levels with a joystick, so it makes sense to me that it would work like that.  Plus, it makes it much easier to tie into the actual gameplay.

[dumbmanex]

I don't know if there are any rules to doing this, but I tried to make a title screen match up with the feel of the game, visually and audibly.  I like having some kind of motion present, like something in the background, or maybe slightly bobbing buttons.  A simple "button" layout also.  I dunno, it probably varies from person to person big time.

This video here, the beginning has the title screen for a few seconds, but none of the sound effects are in, just music from the game playing over it.  I fail at audio+video capture .

[Alistair Aitcheson]

There's just so much space to fill, I never know what to do with it all.

I'd say you don't need to fill the space much at all. If you can have one large iconic image that suits the mood of the game, and the menu buttons just in the bottom-left corner that would be much more interesting aesthetically than something that fills a whole screen.



This is from a game I worked on a few years ago for an XNA competition. I think it's quite simple and effective, with the options bunched up on one side and the big purple Kraken on the other side. There's much more interesting things you could do with that kind of composition, but it shows the basics of it.

You could also look at DVD menus too. Some of these look really interesting, with clips in the background and menus on top.

[Alistair Aitcheson]

This video here, the beginning has the title screen for a few seconds, but none of the sound effects are in, just music from the game playing over it.  I fail at audio+video capture Tongue.

That menu looks awesome

[dumbmanex]

This video here, the beginning has the title screen for a few seconds, but none of the sound effects are in, just music from the game playing over it.  I fail at audio+video capture Tongue.

That menu looks awesome

Thanks.  At one point and time when I was close to being finished, I wanted to change the background to a better drawn static image, but I asked my tester and a few others for their opinion first, nope, they liked it fine just the way it was.  Less work for me. 

[InhumanUndeadGames]

They're quite easy in GM7 or GM8.
I've made one for most of my games

[deathtotheweird]

Check out the article by PerrinAshcroft, which is very relevant:
http://lockeddoorpuzzle.com/site/devblog/expectations

some of my favorite main menus are interactive

such as braid, darwinia, hammerfight

and paincube has a pretty cool interactive main menu, that also acts as a tutorial:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=11870.0

It depends on your game though. Sometimes a simple background and a nice font will do the trick. Which I think Mirror Stage has a nice simple main menu. I guess you could make an interactive main menu with mirror stage, but I don't think it would fit as well.

[jotapeh]

A lot of games take the 'website' approach to title screens and menus. The main title screen often looks like someone slapped a standard javascript menubar on top of a detailed static image and call it a day. To be honest, this is sort of fair, the analogy does hold up - a website is a set of links to get you places, as is the main menu of your game. However, I would avoid treating it like this.

The key thing to remember is that as a game dev you have access to a lot more animation and interactivity power than a website and even the menus can (should) be a pleasure to watch and navigate. Assassin's Creed 2 had a menu system that I thought was particularly slick in this regard.

[I_smell]

Here's a whole fuckin bunch.

I have the opposite problem where I put too much stuff on a title screen.
Most of my title screens are inspired by like old cartoons and arcade games, so they start with a big splash animation, then kind of keep on fizzlin.
l'example

[Core Xii]

I like how in Torchlight the main menu shows your last played character in his environment.

[Mipe]

Or a gameplay demo playing behind the transparent main menu interface.

[___]

Animate your title screen in at least some way, even if its just a constantly moving background image.  It will be 100x more awesome automatically.

[TheLastBanana]

These are all really helpful, thanks.
I'm thinking of, at the bare minimum, having the icons animate when they're selected as well as having some faint scanlines that scroll by.  It's at least more interesting that way.

[jcsymmes]

Always been a big fan of Super Mario World, in which mario litterally runs at the bottom of the screen facing all the games ennimes. This was a suprising lot of fun. Less a screen then more an overlay of the game is a great idea which i am suprised i don't see more often.

[gunswordfist]

I love games that have gameplay shown on the main menu. You don't have to sit there and be idle to have some gameplay footage come up and you can see what the game is like while scrolling through the menu. Just awesome.