Creating state and screens

So far the game has loaded, jumped straight into the action and on completing a level just jumped straight back to playing.

I need to have some sort of naturally flowing state to the game such as...

Start page
Playing game
Level complete page
Game over page

And probably a Game paused page

This will allow the user to naturally flow through the main states of the game and provide input into what happens. Such as start or quit the game, pause play, see how well they did on a level or review how well they did at game over.

I've already got my enum to let me know what state my playing game is so I've added more states to this to represent these extra sections.

All I need to do is have some screens displayed to the user with a way of choosing options.

I've created a base Game screen class that draws a background image on screen and You can also provide it an array of menu choices which get rendered to screen. The default class also allows navigation and selecting menu items.

Now for each game state that requires a screen, I just extend this base class and add any custom functions such as displaying the end of level score or letting the user start a game.

There are much better state systems for XNA but this one is very easy to implement and serves my needs just fine.

Now my game has a nice flow of states.

Splash: check for user input to determine controlling game pad.

Main menu: can start the game, view controls or quit game.

Playing: game play mode

Paused: game froze, can also quit to main menu

Level complete: show score break down

Game over: show final score

Quit confirm: any time the user wants to quit just get them to confirm it.