Main menu design: what every game menu needs

The short answer

At minimum a main menu needs the game's name, one obvious primary action, Continue when a save exists, Settings, Quit on PC, a version number, and input prompts on console. Put Continue first once a save exists, and leave it out entirely on first run rather than greying it out. Keep to four to six top-level items, and push credits, achievements and social links into a corner or a submenu.

What a main menu is actually for

It has three jobs, in this order, and they conflict less often than people assume.

1. Get the player into the game as fast as possible. For a returning player that should be one input. Everything else on the screen is secondary to that.
2. Set the tone. This is the first impression of the game's world, and the only screen where atmosphere is worth spending pixels on.
3. Provide the housekeeping. Settings, quit, credits, store links. Necessary, and none of it should compete with the first job.

Most weak main menus fail the first job while trying very hard at the second. A beautiful screen that takes four inputs to get past is a worse menu than a plain one that takes one.

The elements every main menu needs

Everything else, credits, achievements, store, social links, DLC, is optional and belongs in the corners or one level down. If your menu has nine top-level items, at least four of them are somebody's feature request rather than a player's need.

Order the list by what players actually do

The default order in most engine templates is New Game, Continue, Options, Quit. That order is correct for exactly one session of one player's life, and wrong for every session after it.

Put Continue first, as the primary action, once a save exists. The overwhelming majority of launches after the first are returning players, and making them skip past New Game every single time is a small tax charged repeatedly. On the first run, when there is no save, Continue should not be present at all, and New Game takes the primary position.

First run and returning player are two designs

The second row is where menus earn goodwill cheaply. "Continue: Chapter 3, 4h 12m" tells a returning player the save is the one they expect, which removes a small anxiety they may not even articulate.

Four layouts that work

The vertical list is the correct answer far more often than its reputation suggests. It is not boring, it is solved, and the interest should come from the type, the art and the motion rather than from making the player hunt for the buttons.

Controller focus is the whole interaction

On a gamepad there is no cursor. The focus state is the only thing telling the player where they are, which makes it the most important visual state in the entire screen, not a subtle nicety.

• Something must be focused on arrival. A menu that opens with nothing selected leaves a controller player pressing directions to find out where they are.
• Focus must be obvious from ten feet away. A slight tint is not enough. Change fill, add a clear ring, or move the item.
• Define the order explicitly, including wrapping at the ends. Do not leave it to whatever the engine infers from the hierarchy.
• B or Circle goes back, everywhere, always. On the main menu, it should do nothing rather than quit.
• Never focus a disabled item. Skip it in the order entirely.

This is the same discipline the Astro Protocol menus were built with: primary confirmations in a fixed position on every screen, so the player learns one pattern and reuses it everywhere.

Type, contrast and the key art problem

The recurring technical problem with main menus is that the text sits over artwork, and artwork is not a uniform background. A label that is perfectly legible over the dark left third becomes unreadable when the art changes or the animation loops to a brighter frame.

• Give the text its own contrast, not borrowed from the art: a soft gradient scrim, a low-opacity plate, or a defined dark zone in the artwork itself.
• Test against the brightest frame of any animated background, not a static screenshot.
• Keep the type simple. One display face for the title, one readable face for everything else. A menu is not the place for four typefaces.
• Body and label text needs to survive TV distance. If it ships on console, read it standing across the room before signing it off.

Motion: what to animate, and what to leave alone

Motion is what separates a menu that feels expensive from one that feels static, and it is also the easiest place to overdo it and make the screen feel slow.

The rule that covers most of it: animation should acknowledge the player's input or set atmosphere in the background. It should never sit between the player and the thing they are trying to press. The durations, easing and transition rules are in UI animation.

Settings, and the pause menu relationship

Settings should be reachable from the main menu and from pause, and it should be the same screen in both places. Two divergent settings screens is a maintenance problem and a source of genuine player confusion when an option exists in one and not the other.

The pause menu is the main menu's sibling, not a separate design: same components, same order where the items overlap, same visual language. If Resume is the primary action on pause and Continue is primary on the main menu, they should look like the same idea.

A main menu checklist

1. Launch with an empty save folder. Does the menu make sense with no save?
2. Is there exactly one obvious primary action?
3. Is Continue first, and does it say what you are continuing?
4. Can you reach Settings in one input from here?
5. Is something focused when the screen opens, and is that focus obvious from across the room?
6. Does B or Circle behave predictably on every submenu?
7. Is every label legible over the brightest frame of the background?
8. Does Quit ask for confirmation, and does the confirmation default to the safe option?
9. Is the version number visible and unobtrusive?
10. Does the screen look right in a 16:9 screenshot with nothing else around it?

That last one matters more than it sounds. Your main menu is going to be cropped into a store capsule, a thumbnail and a press screenshot. Design it knowing that is where it will spend most of its life.

Further reading

• Game UI Database: main menus from shipped games, to compare yours against.
• Xbox Accessibility Guidelines: guidance that applies to menus and focus states.