The Space Invaders version that we developed in the previous chapter starts a new game as soon as the application is loaded. In most games, an initial screen is displayed and the player can choose between different options apart from starting a new game, such as changing the default controls or taking a look at the high scores.

The cocos.menu cocos2d module offers a Layer subclass named Menu, which serves exactly this purpose. By extending it, you can override its __init__ method and set the style of the title, the menu items, and the selected menu item.

These items are represented as a list of MenuItem instances. Once this list is instantiated, you can call the create_menu method, which builds the final menu with the actions that are executed when a menu item is selected.

While the basic MenuItem only displays a static label, there are several MenuItem subclasses for distinct input modes: