OpenGL Game Development By Example

Graphical User Interface

It is now time to turn our attention to the graphical user interface, or GUI. The GUI allows us to control other elements of the game, such as starting or stopping the game, or setting various options.

In this section, you will learn how to create buttons on the screen that can be clicked by the mouse. We'll keep it simple by adding a single button to pause the game. While we are at it, we will learn important lessons about game state.

Creating a button

A button is nothing more than a texture that is being displayed on the screen. However, we have to perform some special coding to detect whether or not the button is being clicked. We will add this functionality to the sprite class so that our buttons are being handled by ...