I would like to say that it depends on what kind of game it is. If it is a
game you'd expect your players to play during short periods but often it
would be ok with pressing escape twice to quit the game, but if it is a
game that the players have to invest a lot of time and skill in the
probably quite common misstake of pressing esc twice would have quite dire
consequences for the poor player (accidentially quitting the game instead
of pausing before the last boss wouldnt be funny at all).
My preference would be to have the escape key to access or dismiss the menu
and to use the same keys you navigate in the game to navigate the menu,
including "fire" to select an menu item.
Regards /Christian
That works well for you as the developer, but as a gamer -- unless the UI is VERY specific about this -- I assume that if I press ESC once, it toggles paused/menu mode. If I press ESC again, it'll toggle it back off. It's been hard for me over the years to learn that something which works REALLY nicely from a code standpoint is often VERY far from what the user is going to expect. We're just saying this because we know you'll get bunches of emails asking for that change anyway.
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