Restart Menu and Bugs

So today I worked on changing the pause screen to a pause *menu*, which looks the same, but is actually handled differently in AndEngine. So now, the same pause image pops up (actually it fades in now) but below it there is a smaller, similar image that says "RESET" and clicking it resets the game, obviously. It actually took me a couple hours to get the pause menu set up and working properly with the reset functionality, but that was mostly because I had a hard time actually figuring out what the menu code was doing. In hindsight, it is pretty simple.

After I got that all figured out, I play tested for a while, and found that "pausing" at certain times during the game caused a few or all of the tiles to remain visible when the pause menu was up, which shouldn't happen. You could also sometimes get it to show the board after the reset option was chosen, but before the tiles went through their spawn animation, so you could look at your board before the game was started, which is another thing that shouldn't happen. After playing around with it for a while, I determined that it was specifically pausing while the tiles were sliding that caused the issue. I attempted to fix this issue in vain for at least an hour, probably closer to an hour and a half or two, by adding all kinds of sections that made all the tiles invisible and checks to see if the game was paused or not. None of these options were working and I was getting pretty frustrated.

Luckily, the easiest solutions are often the best ones, and I decided to simply not allow players to pause the game while tiles are actively sliding around the board. All this really means is that after making your move, you just have to wait for all the chains to fall before you can pause, which I think is fine. although some people who are in a hurry for some reason might be confused as to why they can't get the game to pause. So now when you've played a game and its all over, you can bring up the pause menu and restart your game instead of leaving the app and loading it back up, which was the only to start a new game up until this point.

A little more play testing is needed, but I think the addition of the pause menu just about wraps up all the functionality for the actual game play. Now on to the exciting world of main pages and settings menus.