Dev Blog - 17 Jan 2026

All I wanted to do was add a Pause Menu. That was it.

I needed somewhere to put a few debug options so I could toggle things like the sky, clouds, terrain, and water on and off. The goal was simple: work out what was having the biggest impact on frame rate when running on the Steam Deck.

I could have thrown together a very basic pause screen with a few plain buttons. But I realised this was a good opportunity to properly think about the look and feel of Supersonic Fight’s user interface, starting with the Pause Menu.

I spent some time playing other games and paying attention to what I liked and didn’t like. I also searched Reddit for pause menus that people love...and ones they hate.

One thing came up again and again

it needs to be fast. No clutter. No flashy animations.

Just functional

Next, I needed a dialog to actually display those debug options. Once again, I went digging through my Steam library and various Reddit threads. This time I made a list of things I knew I wanted, and a few things I definitely didn’t.

It’s still very much a work in progress, but here’s where things stand at the moment:

There’s plenty more refining and polishing to do, but I’m happy with the direction it’s heading in so far.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts - and I’m especially interested in user interfaces you love...or ones you really don’t.

Rich