Pause Menu

Author: Keon Fryson

While setting up the pause menu this week, I ran into a frustrating bug: the menu would open fine the first time, but after hitting "Resume" and trying to open it again, nothing would show up. The input was working, and the game was pausing, but the UI just wouldn’t appear again. I double-checked the logic that shows the pause menu and everything seemed like it should work.

This was a serious issue, because the pause menu is a critical part of player control. If players can’t access it to change settings, resume, or exit, it breaks the whole game flow. I needed to fix it quickly so that the UI felt reliable.

After checking through the widget hierarchy, I realized the problem was that I was only hiding a Canvas Panel inside the pause menu widget, not the entire widget itself. So when I resumed the game, only the panel was hidden. Later, when I told the widget to show again, the widget was technically visible, but the panel with all the buttons and UI elements was still hidden. That’s why nothing came up.

The fix was simple: instead of just hiding the Canvas Panel, I made sure to hide and show the entire widget. Once I updated the logic to control the full widget’s visibility, everything worked as expected. The pause menu now shows up correctly every time I pause the game.