Thanks dude!
I revamped the title screen. Gone is the 3D sequence where you fly through the house. I felt it didn't really fit with the theme of the game and it was more just to play around with 3D. The new one is based on puppet shadow theaters, and I'll admit it's a helluva lot more creepy, and eerie. The former was more sad and melancholic.
So here's a simple composition of the Title Screen Scene. I re-used assets from the game world. I stripped the manor from the game's logo and upped the contrast.
But obviously that wasn't enough. I needed to really give it more life. For that I decided to animate the camera in a way that mirrors a shaky hand cam. I wrote a script that I can control with some simple variables where the position and rotation within a specific constraint would randomly shift around at, again ,random times. The results were quite pleasing:
I still felt it needed something more, and by pure luck, a glitch caused the camera to bounce around instead of smoothly transition between random points. This "jerk" reminded me of some creepy music videos by Nine Inch Nails (what an awesome band). So I added some more variables that introduce a jerk at random times, and the result:
Now the Title screen really came to life. Yet still I needed to tie it in to the game more. The obvious choice was to add a shadow puppet representing the most distinct character in the game. Again, to add more life and realism to the puppet, I sectioned it up into limbs, torso, pigtails and connected them via hinge joints. I made the only animated part the stick holding it up. That way the motion would be exaggerated down the joints, and the puppet parts would play around more as it moved.
For sheer freakishness, the graves on the hill were animation, and the large tree would shudder every now and then.
The final touch of realism was to blur out the edges of some of the elements. In a real puppet theater, the puppet would never be completely flat. They'd always start to shrivel at the edges, and that gave a distinctive look as they are positioned on the theater screen.
Now for the only interactive element, the Start button. It started out with an encompassing frame, but that ate up too much of the screen. So I settled with decor elements on the sides, which looks better really. Then to fit the art style, I blurred it a little, but then the text "start" became a little hard to distinguish from the rest of the screen. So I added a little scaling animation to it to attract the player's attention. Still, the text was hard to see. So I removed the blur from it, and voila! That did the trick.
While it looked good in the editing view, in-game as the camera was shifting and jerking, the Start button would get partially overlapped with the scenery. So I shifted what I could away from it without hurting the screen composition too much, as well as upping the brightness on what I couldn't move. So now the middle area of the screen is mostly clear and the Start button is very distinct.
Worth mentioning is that the logo and the start button are children to the camera. It doesn't matter how erratic the camera movement is, the logo and button will always be stationary.
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