From my research I found that a pause menu is often a part of tower defence games and because of this players may be expecting to find a pause menu on our game, so to keep with the conventions of tower defence games adding a pause menu would be a good idea for our game and would work well with our game as a pause menu doesn’t in anyway brake or worsen the game.
We also found during the play tests we kept attempting to pause the game to discuss content, however we didn’t have a pause menu, which made talking about content harder, because of this we decided a pause menu would be a good idea to add into the game so I create one.
Because I wasn’t sure how to create a pause menu I researched into it, using an online tutorial I found two ways of pausing the game.
With the pause menu I wasn’t sure how I wanted it to work between pausing everything on the screen and so having a still image with some text stating that the game is paused. Or make the screen fully black and state that the game was paused, I decided to go for the latter for a temporary way to pause the game as it didn’t require too much development time to create and would also work well for the basis for a more in-depth menu later in development with features such as help quit and resume as when this is developed more I can place buttons onto the screen that have effects such as quitting the game for example; this wouldn’t be so easy to move onto if i did the first option as have the image freeze and then place menu buttons on top would have made the menu seem out of place which is why I chose not to use that method. Also according to the tutorial I looked at the first method doesn’t pause alarms and because our game uses power ups that use the alarm system with the first method if the players pause the game their power ups would run out, which wouldn’t have been welcomed by players. I did a poll to ask players which idea they liked the sound of most and most said the first option; some voted for the second as they believed it wouldn’t effect their game play much as they wouldn’t often pause the game.
These videos were very useful to me; this is because it gave me positives and negative aspects of each method this made it easier for me to chose which one to use.
Here is the working pause menu in game
Evolution of Defence 