GameDevHQ Crash Course #24 Loading Screens

Main Menus-Loading Screens

Important but easily overlooked for most games loading screens help display to the user that the game has not in fact crashed and is actively loading a new area, a lot of games have static load screens displaying no information to the user what is going on.

So lets finish up this current game with a main menu and a loading screen to get into the level.

First we need to build ourselves a main menu

Using Timeline we add some animations to the logo and the start and quit buttons along with a black fade in effect to give it a nice simple alive feeling.

Then we make ourselves a loading scene and set up our loading background. We have also added a red background bar for our loading bar to load over.

Then we and a second smaller bar, we are just using plain coloured image rectangles here, we could make it a % number or an animation just as easily. We have put a splatter effect over the bar the same colour as the background bar to give it a bit more pop.

Now we add a script to our yellow image to make it fill depending on how much of the game has loaded.

AsynchOperation is lets us load the scene in the background while the current scene is displayed. we set it so it auto loads the next scene when the load is complete. then in a while loop we add to our bar the progress of the asynchoperation so we give the player some feedback on the load progress