First Layout Draft

I created a simple layout draft in Unreal Engine of the Campaign tab:

The plan is to have the Load Game and New Game buttons look like the World Map button when the mouse isn't hovering over them, then have the text grow smaller and move to the top left of the button, and have the sub buttons fade in, all within ~0.3 seconds. Either that, or not have the big buttons as buttons at all, and instead just a border or background image, and not have any animation.

Applying Fitts' Law to this, showing more information on the hover is a good thing, as it means the players don't need to use more effort to click or go through more menus in order to get to the thing they want in the game. It's quite streamlined, and also quite large, which means that it's easier for players to get to buttons as there's less distance they need to cover, something specifically stated in Fitts' Law.

Taking C.R.A.P. into account, contrast doesn't matter at the moment because it's a wireframe currently, repetition is used to have the three big buttons show more underneath, and will also be used in the styling to provide consistency which allows the player to make a note that this is what this style of button does and where it might be used, alignment is used to place the Load Game section on the left and make it the largest, as players will be using that the most, and will also quick save a lot, so allowing a large vertical space for those saves is crucial, and proximity isn't used as much, but is still prevalent with the three buttons all being for the campaign tab, without including anything from other tabs that aren't related.

An idea I had with the replays system is to have that be one of the main tabs, so that players can record replays of the campaign within the game and watch them from the main menu without needing to go into the multiplayer tab to find them. This makes third-party clipping tools obsolete, as the replays will be data captured from the game instead of a screen recording, so the quality will be infinitely better, and mods can turn a seemingly normal recording into an awesome display of effects. The only problem with this approach is the tickrate of the recording, essentially the FPS at which is records the data. This can easily be a setting in the Settings tab, so the player can change that there depending on how much storage and quality they want it to be. In addition, because the game is recording the data and not a screen recording, the file sizes should be a lot smaller as they are not resolution dependent.

I decided to test if this was true so that I had evidence, and yes, a demo file is smaller than a 1080p recording of one round.

CS:GO's demo file

OBS' screen recording (1080p)

Now, a clipping program like Medal compresses the videos, which makes it ideal for sharing 30 second clips and such to friends, however they aren't great quality because of the compression. Sure they have smaller file sizes, but the cons are too large for them to be use for anything more than "look at this cool kill I got". Therefore, I believe demo files are the way to go for full game recordings and clips, as then they can be viewed however anyone wants, with different angles, resolutions, aspect ratios, skins, mods, etc.