raygui Game Menus

A demo of raygui — a single-header immediate-mode GUI library for raylib — building a complete set of interactive game menus.

A port of the clay-ui demo to raygui. Five fully-interactive scenes plus a modal form, in the same shared style. Hover, click, scroll, text input, floating overlays, scroll containers, tabbed views — most of what raygui + raylib needs to put on screen for a game's front-end.

Scenes

1. Main menu	2. Character select
* Forge a new hero (modal)	3. Inventory
4. Settings	5. HUD / pause

#	scene	demonstrates
1	Main menu	typography hierarchy, hover accent bars, info strips
2	Character select	data-driven cards, click selection, stat bars per slot
3	Inventory	scroll container with scissor clipping, filter pills, rarity colour
4	Settings	tabbed sub-views, sliders, toggles, steppers, key-binding rows
5	HUD / pause	layered HUD over a play space, floating pause overlay
*	Forge a new hero	a modal form: text input, class stepper, accent swatches, stat allocator

Run

brew install raylib   # macOS, one-time
./run.sh

run.sh builds incrementally and execs the binary. Tested on macOS 14+ / Apple Silicon with Raylib 5.5 and raygui 5.0. raygui is vendored as a single header (vendor/raygui.h).

Controls

1-5 (or click the sidebar)	switch scene
Click	interact with anything that hovers
Scroll	scroll the inventory list
ESC / P on the HUD	toggle pause
ESC in the new-hero form	cancel
Typing	enters the hero name field when the form is open

How it's wired

raygui is an immediate-mode GUI library, in contrast to Clay's declarative layout engine. Everywhere clay-ui says "give me a flexbox column with childGap = 8," raygui needs an explicit Rectangle per widget. The trade is more arithmetic per scene in exchange for zero layout-engine state.

The drawing model is also flatter: there are no render commands, no layout pass — every UI_Panel(...), GuiSliderBar(...), DrawText(...) issues straight to raylib's frame.

SetConfigFlags(FLAG_VSYNC_HINT | FLAG_WINDOW_RESIZABLE | FLAG_MSAA_4X_HINT | FLAG_WINDOW_HIGHDPI);
InitWindow(1280, 800, "raygui Game Menus");

while (!WindowShouldClose()) {
    BeginDrawing();
        ClearBackground((Color){ 12, 12, 18, 255 });

        Rectangle sidebar = { 0, 0, 220, sh };
        Rectangle scene   = { 220, 0, sw - 220, sh - 32 };
        Rectangle footer  = { 220, sh - 32, sw - 220, 32 };

        switch (state.scene) {
            case SCENE_MAIN_MENU: Scene_MainMenu(&state, scene); break;
            /* ... */
        }
        Sidebar(&state, sidebar);
        Footer(footer);
    EndDrawing();
}

Patterns worth a look:

• Hover — UI_Hovered(rect) is just CheckCollisionPointRec(GetMousePosition(), r) gated by a "modal active" latch. Switching background/border colours on hover is one ternary in the draw call.
• Click handling — if (UI_Hovered(r) && IsMouseButtonPressed(MOUSE_BUTTON_LEFT)) per widget, inline with its draw.
• Scroll — BeginScissorMode(...) clips the list rect; rows are drawn with a -state->inventoryScroll y-offset. A small thumb on the right is drawn from the same offset.
• Modals / overlays — a g_modalActive flag in ui.c makes the base layer's UI_Hovered return false while the modal is up, so the form and the pause overlay automatically eat all clicks beneath them.
• Dynamic text — UI_Fmt(...) writes to a per-frame string arena (src/ui.c) so format-strings can be drawn directly without a heap allocation.

Project layout

src/
  main.c       entry, scene dispatcher, raylib glue, screenshot mode
  ui.h / ui.c  palette, sidebar, footer, StatBar, panel/text primitives, frame string arena
  scenes.c     five scenes + the new-hero form

vendor/
  raygui.h     raygui 5.0 (single header)

scripts/
  capture.sh   regenerate the screenshots in this README

Reproducing the screenshots

The binary recognises three environment variables for non-interactive captures (no manual screenshotting needed):

variable	meaning
RAYGUI_SCREENSHOT	basename of the PNG to write; the app exits a few frames after writing
RAYGUI_SCENE	start in scene 0-4 (main / character / inventory / settings / hud)
RAYGUI_FORM=1	open the new-hero form (meaningful with RAYGUI_SCENE=1)

RAYGUI_SCENE=1 RAYGUI_FORM=1 RAYGUI_SCREENSHOT=hero.png ./build/raygui-menus

scripts/capture.sh regenerates everything in docs/assets/ in one go.

License

raygui and raylib are both Zlib-licensed. The demo code is yours to copy.

Code Statistics

Language	Files	Lines	Blanks	Comments	Code	Complexity
C	3	1,605	185	88	1,332	196
C Header	2	6,165	893	1,235	4,037	1,092
Markdown	2	147	35	0	112	0
Shell	2	27	3	3	21	0
Makefile	1	23	7	0	16	0
Total	10	7,967	1,123	1,326	5,518	1,288

• Estimated Cost to Develop (organic): $162,355
• Estimated Schedule Effort (organic): 6.89 months
• Estimated People Required (organic): 2.09
• Processed: 371,630 bytes (0.372 megabytes)

Generated with scc on 2026-05-22