When in doubt, BOTH! Why not?

Selection/back buttons should be fairly straightforward, such as spacebar, Enter, or the default "yes" key for the game (would depend on the controls to begin with). Esc is usually a good choice for "back", though you could have a generic "no" key sorta thing.

I'm not making sense here. Basically, what I mean is some sort of A button vs B button, kinda like some kind of console game. Cave Story does this sort of thing with z and x.

If we have Cave Story-esque controls for the rest of the game, we should do that.

But here's my opinion: if the mouse has any function in the rest of the game, that should be used for selection/back. If the game is keyboard only, we can just use Enter for selection and Esc for back.

Or we could have it be sort of like a DVD menu in a PC, where you can use arrows/enter/backspace OR just click on whatever option you want.

Maybe.

Since we were also thinking of doing a journal to log your adventures-type game, maybe the menu could be in the style of stationary with post-it notes and a "Table of Contents" for the menu itself.

If we did that, the mouse would likely be used for the menu.

That would be fairly cool, and yes, we would probably use the mouse for it. That's how Far Cry 2 did it.

Alright, I'll get started on that.

If you want a parchment/old paper effect, try doing a gold to tan cloud render in Photoshop and zooming it in.

I have crap art at the moment. I'll leave all that fancy mumbojumbo to Howitz. I want to focus on the code. The way I've done it, leaves room for an opening-book animation before the menu loads and a closing-book animation when you get past it and load a map. I only have 6 different frames for the book, unfortunately, but that can be altered easily, so Howitz has room for creativity with this sprite sheet.