Hey again. Before a player makes a choice, watches a scene, or even starts a story, they see the menu. That's what this devlog's about.
For a long time the menus in ChoiceStory were something you filled in. There was a main menu, you set a title, picked a background, dropped in a few buttons, and that was about it. The work since then went into turning all of that into something you design instead. You grab a button and drag it where you want. You stack backgrounds. You put the choice buttons that show up over a video exactly where they should sit. What you see in the editor is what the player gets.
Three pieces came out of it.
The first is layered backgrounds for the main menu. Instead of one image or one colour behind your menu, you can stack up to five layers, images or a video, and move each one on its own. Think of it like layers in Photoshop: a still backdrop at the bottom, a slow video over it, a logo or a bit of foreground art on top, each one dragged and sized on its own. The bottom layer also sets the letterbox colour, the band that frames the menu, and that band is the contrast that keeps your title and buttons readable no matter how busy the art behind them gets.
Watch how the layers stack, and how each one drags and resizes on its own without dragging the others with it.
While we were in there we rebuilt the menu property panel into collapsible sections, because once you can do this much to a menu, a flat wall of controls stops being usable. We also pinned the editor to a fixed 16:9 stage. Sounds small, but it fixed a real problem: the surface used to stretch to fill whatever space it had, so resizing the window made your carefully placed elements drift. Now the stage holds its shape and what you place stays put.
The second piece is the pause menu, which now runs on the same system as the main menu. Layered backgrounds, drag-and-drop, the same panel, all of it. Both menus sit on one shared engine underneath, so a change to one shows up in the other instead of us building it twice. That shared base is also why the third piece almost came along for free.
The third piece is the choice screen editor, the buttons that come up over a video when the player has to decide something, Late Shift style. These used to be stuck to a layout we'd hardcoded. Now you design them by hand, and you can lay out each case on its own, whether a choice has two options or five. Drag the buttons where you want them, save, and every choice of that shape in your story follows the layout you set. The text scales to fit, so the same design holds up on a small laptop and a big monitor without you touching it.
Pick how many options the choice has, drag each button into place, then hit play to see it land over the live scene.
Now the honest part.
The layered background didn't go in cleanly. The first build of it shipped a crash. Drag the background colour control and the whole menu would flash white and freeze, with the app throwing a "maximum update depth exceeded." Turned out it was a single colour input box talking to itself: every value we wrote back into it kicked off another change, which wrote another value, in a loop that never settled. We reset back to the last solid version, kept the broken attempt on a side branch so we could pick it apart, and rebuilt the feature in small slices instead of one big drop, with the colour input rewritten so it can't re-enter itself like that.
That mess also pushed us into a call we'd been circling for a while. We dropped solid-colour menu backgrounds for good. They were behind half the trouble. A white background quietly turned the white menu text invisible, and the hidden "colour mode" was the thing stopping people from just uploading an image. Backgrounds are images and video now, with the letterbox doing the job the flat colour used to. Less to set up, and a lot harder to end up with a menu you can't read.
None of this is the flashy half of the tool. But the menu is the first thing anyone sees when they open a story, and the choice screen is the moment the whole "you decide" idea either lands or it doesn't, so it was worth getting the authoring right instead of leaving it baked in.
Same ask as always. We're building this in the open and heading into alpha because we want the people who'll actually make stories with it to tell us what's wrong with it. If a menu workflow feels backwards, or there's something you'd need that isn't here, come say so. On X, in the Discord, or by email. The harsh stuff especially.
More soon...
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