Options menu? (2D games)

Game Play & Game Design
#1

So I was just thinking how I’ve never done an options menu in any of my projects before, and I realized I have very little of an idea what actually to put in it and how it should be organized. For just a simple 2D sprite-based game, what exactly needs to be in the options menu? I’ll be using LibGDX for most of my future projects, so I’m not sure how limiting that’ll be for the amount of options.
Also for developing cross-platform (say, desktop and android), there would be different options for each platform I presume, so how would I go about implementing that on the LibGDX side? (I’m new to LibGDX btw)

Thanks!

#2

Depends entirely on the features set, and actually you could let the user customize a ton of stuff, but as for what you really need?

Start Game
Exit

That’s it, but usually there’s more:

Save/Load Game?
Level selector?
Adjustable difficulty?
Adjustable Graphics for older computers?
Adjustable Resolution?
Adjustable Sound Volume?
Controls?

Also, why would you have different options for different platforms? I mean resolution sizes, but I can’t think of any options that I’d want to give player on one platform vs another, assuming indie game.

#3

If you didn’t already know, LibGDX has a UI library built in: scene2d. It’s pretty easy to use to add buttons, sliders, and more.

For managing different platforms, there are many different ways you can do it such as having a different option screen class for each platform, so my next idea is just one option of many. So you’ll probably have a screen class called Options. When you show the options screen, you would do a check to see what platform the game is on with the method Gdx.app.getApplicationType() or whatever the method is. Then you could have separate methods for creating the options screen for each platform, so: initDesktopOptions() and initAndroidOptions(). Then you could create the UI elements for each type in each of those methods.