What is the best way to set up menus with cocos2d?

Question

I'm new to development and I have played around with a few tutorials. I wonder what the best way to set up a menu for a game with cocos2d?

I want a MainMenu with a Startbutton, SettingsButton, HighScoresButton and a little info/creditsButton in the corner.

How should I set this up?

Should I have the MainMenu as a Scene and the others as layers or just make all of them as separate Scenes?

The buttons that I add, should they be a plain button and then I add the textLabel on top or should I make them complete with textLabel?

I would like the buttons to "wiggle" like it is made of jello when i tap them, how do I do that?

As I said, I am new to this but I wanna learn as much as I can before school starts. I'm currently taking a summer class in iphone development so I get a head start for the next semester. I would like to see experienced game developers to help me out with this since i want to work with that when I get older, if they could also show me how to structure a game and the design.

Thank you so much. David H

Answer 1

You've got several questions buried in there, so I'll address them in order...

First, to save on memory, you should break sections of your game, including menus, into separate scenes and switch between them using:

[[CCDirector sharedDirector]  replaceScene: yourScene];

Alternatively you can use pushScene: and popScene, but these hold pushed scenes in memory and can be very costly depending on what you've got in the scene.

As for how to design your buttons, that's completely up to you and what fits best with the game. Some games look fine with text buttons. Others need a more stylized button that is best created with images. Remember, a CCMenuItem (button) is just a CCNode, so you can layer images and text in almost any way you wish.

Animating buttons is going to be a manual thing. I suggest subclassing the CCMenuItem, or CCMenuItemImage and overriding the selected and unselected methods to animate the underlying images.

Answer 2

We used cocos2d for our game The Selfish Birdbreeder. You can find the game and source here and dig around. I'm pretty certain we have a main menu.

http://pyweek.org/e/BirdBreeder/