I started this week work where I left it the other week. So this mean I continue on the main menu and the background. I want it to be as clean as possible for our beta deadline which is this Friday this week.
The background from last week was pretty much done except the colors and some shading. I am working with Photoshop and there for I am using a lot of layers. I will try to explain what a layer in Photoshop are since I have got some feedback from some readers that ask me to explain which program I am using and explain more what it do. So a layer in Photoshop represent a piece of paper sort of, you can manipulate it and I use it for keep some colors and items separated. This helps a lot if you need to remake the color or maybe an object. Then you go to the layer (remember to name the layer to something that represent that drawing on the layer) and change what you want to change.
So I colored the background and added some rough shades and light to it. I am pretty satisfied how it turned out, I am looking for a cartoon-ish style and not too realistic. I did though add some texture on the brick wall, road and the house which I do say looks pretty neat.
I also spent my time on all the buttons and windows for the menu. Here I needed to keep to the style we have in the HUD (Head-Up Display) in game, example of a HUD is the inventory in our game.
I managed to do pretty well with the final result but I did struggle. I accidently saved over my whole file with all the buttons and I had to remake them all again.
First I created the frame of the button and colored in separate layers. After that I started to make some lamps which I wanted to light up the buttons when the player holds the mouse over the buttons.
After I attached the lamps to the frame button I made all the text. Each button has two types of text one with a lower opacity of glow and other one with a higher opacity of glow. The lower one will be used when the mouse is not on the button and the other one when the mouse are over the button.
The two windows screen Credits and Score Board I created was the same process except I did not have two different text nor two types of lamps. I only made the text with the brighter glow and the lamps when they are switched on.
Thanks for reading and see you next week.
/Kim
teroniborg 
Hej hej hej Kim!
First of all I want to tell you that this was a great blog post. I must say this was a pleasure to read, it was well written and it was well explained with the pictures giving the reader a visual representation of what you are doing and why you choose a cartoonish-style for your game and main menu. You explained well what why and how you made the Menu and HUD. I appreciated that you noticed that all people reading your blog might not be that familiar with Photoshop and that you solved this problem by writing a clear and easy explaination for the reader to understand what layers in this software are and what they are used for. Furthermore by adding texture to the wall and bricks in the first picture you succeeded to create some illusion depth which looks great. And I agree it does look pretty neat indeed! However in order to create even more depth you could decrease the saturation on objects in the back (trees, house, half way of path). Remember that everything in the front has more contrast than in the back where the saturation decreases and day time it reflects the color of the sky. A tip is to search for Italian Alps on Google for more inspiration. 🙂
Moving on to your next task, the buttons. I like the idea of having the light bulbs turn on when you are hovering over the button. The font you choose might be confusing but for your mechanical theme I think it is very well fitting. Only one thing. All the buttons have the same spacing between the letters except the ”YES” button where the ”Y” and ”E” seem to be way too far apart from eachother. This could be easily fixed. I would sugest you to move the ”ES” closer to the ”Y”.
In your last task you wrote about creating the High Score Menu and Credits menu. I like the visual appearence of how the both menus turned out but I am not so sure about the font choice. The titles and categorys could be in the choosen font but the Names should definately be in another font since it might be kind of hard to read. Else well done!
I am really looking forward to play your game once it will be released! Good luck with the polishing these two weeks.
//Lisa
GillaGilla