Designing the Settings Menu

I went through the settings menus of games further along than we were, mainly Clash Royale and Marvel Snap. I was looking less at which options they offered than at how they were ordered.

Clash Royale puts account connection at the very top, above the audio controls. It also buries Delete my Account two levels down inside More Settings, instead of sitting it on the main screen next to the volume sliders. Marvel Snap goes the other way on structure: no sub-screens, one long scrollable list.

I took all three ideas. Connect at the top, the destructive action tucked away, and one scrollable list rather than a menu that branches.

I turned the flat list into one scrollable screen with five named sections: Connect/Cloud Save, Game Settings, Account, Support and Social. Every feature queued behind this work now had an obvious place to land, and so did the ones nobody had thought of yet.

Connect sits at the top, offering Sign in with Apple or Google, with a line explaining what it buys you: your progress and purchases survive losing the phone. The cloud save behind it was a separate piece of work with its own document; this section is where that process starts. Game Settings holds the everyday controls, including a right or left-handed UI toggle that flips the core running controls.

I put Restore Purchases on the surface in Account, and hid Delete Account inside an About popup that also carries the version number and player ID, which used to sit printed in the footer of the old screen. You tick a box confirming you want to discard your data, then type BYESACKBOY before the button enables. I borrowed the buried-popup pattern from Lemmings, where I'd liked the same friction.

I also split each section into what ships now and what waits. Music, SFX, haptics and graphics quality were immediate; notifications, the left-handed toggle, Help/FAQ and Credits were documented in full and flagged for a later release. That's why nothing needed redesigning when those features arrived.

Changing your name was the hardest thing to place. In most games it belongs to the player profile, and Ultimate Sackboy didn't have one. Building a profile screen to hold one feature would've been a poor trade, so I put it in the clothing inventory instead: the one screen where players already stand and look at their own character. The name goes top right, with an edit button next to it.

The rest of the flow deals with what happens when someone gets it wrong, not the happy path. Players get three free changes, so an early bad choice isn't permanent, and each one after that costs 80 gold, priced to discourage churning through names, not punish it. I limited names to 3 to 12 characters and ran every entry against a profanity filter, so the error message had to do real work: rejecting a name without telling the player what exactly tripped the filter.

I prototyped both paths, free and purchased, before writing anything down. Most of what the prototype caught was in the second and third attempt, where the copy has to change without the screen changing.

I wrote the whole thing up for Art, Design, Code and QA, took it through review with the Lead Designer, then the wider stakeholders, and iterated off their feedback. Then I stayed with Code and UI through implementation, testing alongside QA and raising bugs until what was on screen matched what was in the document. The sectioned menu shipped, and the name change shipped with it, profanity filter and all.

The real test came in the releases after mine. Notifications, Help and FAQ, and Credits each arrived and slotted into their section. Nobody had to redesign the menu. That was the point of the five sections, and it held.