⚠️ First, a point worth clarifying: in Celestory, a "Menu" is not the navigation of the tool you use to create. It's a screen inside your finished app — a home screen, a pause screen, settings — that your players will see. It has nothing to do with the Creator's own floating windows.
This article is an overview, not a full walkthrough. For the step-by-step of building one, head to the article Create a Menu and its Pages. Here, we look at the structure instead: what it's for, its core concepts, and the main families of elements available.
🔑 What is a menu?
A menu is a screen outside your story, independent from your Graph. There are four types:
- HUD: the persistent zone shown while a module is being played (a gauge, a score, a pause button…).
- Home: your application's home screen.
- Page: a free additional page — credits, settings, about…
- Overlay: a window that opens on top of the ongoing story, without leaving it.
🚪 How to open it
Open your project menu (the blue button top left), then Menus, or use the shortcut Cmd+Shift+U (Ctrl+Shift+U on Windows) directly.
🧱 The elements placed on a page
A menu page is a stack of elements you arrange and organize. Three main families:
- Content: Text, Image, Video, Sound, HTML5, Web page, Variable (shows different text depending on a variable's value).
- Layout: Horizontal group, Vertical group, Spacer — used to organize your elements together, like stackable containers.
- Interactive settings: Music slider, Sound slider, Simple gauge — sliders and indicators driven by your variables.
🔺 Each element has its own style and appearance: it does not automatically inherit the application's global theme.
🔘 Linking a button to an action
One last family deserves a closer look: buttons. Unlike a Graph block, a menu button is not linked to anything by a wire. Its action is a simple setting, chosen in its own edit window:
- Open menu: navigates to another menu page.
- Open overlay / Close overlay.
- Start: launches a module (with the option to reset the variables).
- Continue: resumes a story already in progress.
- Internet link: opens an external URL.
- Change language: switches the app to another language.
- Social networks: a block of links to your social accounts.
🌳 Menu vs Graph: no flow logic
Here is the real structural difference. The Graph is a network of blocks connected by wires, with branches, conditions, a story that unfolds over time.
A menu, on the other hand, has no flow logic: no wires, no branching, no sequence. It's a static page, organized into stacked groups, where each button triggers a fixed, immediate action. The only hint of "logic" is the Variable element, which shows different text depending on a value — but it never chains decisions the way the Graph does.
🔺 All narrative logic stays in the Graph; menus exist for dressing and navigation around your story.
→ Next step: move on to the practical side with the article Create a Menu and its Pages, which details creating a page and adding your first elements.