Easy guide to: Pause menu

[Greeny]

As it stands, the default action for pressing ESC or right-clicking is to take you immediately to the save screen.
Here's a quick guide to making a custom pause screen appear, from where players can choose to proceed to save, load preferences, and any other screen you want them to access.

The following defines your pause menu:

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screen game_menu:
    tag menu
    
    vbox:
        pos (0.5, 0.5)
        anchor (0.5, 0.5)
        textbutton _("Continue") action Return()
        textbutton _("Save Game") action ShowMenu("save")
        textbutton _("Load Game") action ShowMenu("load")
        textbutton _("Preferences") action ShowMenu("preferences")
        textbutton _("Main Menu") action MainMenu()
        textbutton _("Help") action Help()
        textbutton _("Quit") action Quit()

It's a fairly rudimentary screen; no background or anything like that.
You can replace your textbuttons with imagebuttons, or use an imagemap, to customize the appearance.

Now, all you need to do, is tell your game this is the screen you want to appear on ESC or right-click.
Make sure to put this code at the beginning of your game (after the start label):

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$ _game_menu_screen = "game_menu"

For advanced users:
If there's a scene where you want your players to be unable to pause the game, you can do the following:

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$ _game_menu_screen = None

#your scene here

$ _game_menu_screen = "game_menu"

And they won't be able to access the pause menu during the scene. Use sparingly.
For example, during an ATL-based cutscene.

[noeinan]

Thank you for adding this!

I have currently put this in my code and wanted to add a clarifier: The line $ _game_menu_screen = "game_menu_screen" is actually $ _game_menu_screen = "game_menu" if you use the code in your instructions, and also this line must be after the start label, not before it.

[Greeny]

Weird, though. I understand why, but setting it to "game_menu_screen" seems to work in my project!

I think I remember reading somewhere that Ren'Py will automatically add "_screen" if no such screen is found, but don't take my word for it.

[noeinan]

Huh, I'm not sure. Actually using _screen at the end might still work? I tried getting rid of _screen since I noticed the screen name was technically "game_menu" BUT I did that before realizing I needed to post that after my start label. Perhaps both will work?

[kisa]

Ooh... This looks useful. *yoink*