I understand how in a lot of games, some nice looking pixel art or GFX menus are made to wow the player with fancy looks. This is fine, it adds another element to the game in the aspect of "how good is it's interface" or how player friendly it is.

How would you go about this though? There are a few methods, such as swapmaps so that players can have their own menu or character creation screen. Other ways include a sanctioned portion of the map that players visit and are able to click or activate in order to continue on to the game, this is how most game do this. A few games use a screen overlay to give each player their own menu, but this can become cumbersome when adding or removing these screen overlays, should a large sum of players log in at once.

I've been trying to develop a different way to do things, maybe even making it into a "menu" library.

imagine that you have a sanctioned portion of the map, as usual, but inside of having objects with icons on it, instead, this area is blank. You then attach image objects to the points on the maps that you'd like to have the menu buttons or images appear, then you display it to that player.

This allow you to use one portion of the map, while allowing it to change it's image objects, displaying to the proper recipient, to the appearance of screen objects.

It's a bit hard to explain why this is beneficial, but I'll try...

I've noticed that sometimes, especially with isometric maps, that the size of the icons on the map in comparison to screen objects, differs slightly, in some cases of course. As a result, using screen objects can sometimes appear to be inconsistent with the map, or that they're larger, effectively reducing the amount of space you have to work with, making detailed buttons or images difficult.

However, image objects on the map could solve this, as they can be displayed to specific players, like screen objects, but still maintain the same resolution as other objects on the map.

I like this thought and am going to develop my games' menus around this idea. What are your thoughts, any alternatives or other methods?

tl;dr

I'm going to be making a menu system that uses images, displaying to specific players. what are your thoughts on this method? (read above before if you're going to rageface.)