Sanctuary's UI and menus

So all the level planning is pretty much set, all I need to do is start working on the creation of assets to start putting things together. 

Something that I haven't thought much about was the possibility of having a start menu, mainly to give it an introduction and wrap the project up with a more game-like product. At this point all I can think of putting is a 'Press ___ to start' as there wont be any 'New Game' / 'Continue' feature. Because is a self contained level without any current plan of expanding it, there's no point of involving a saving game system nor even putting a pause function as there's no time limitation to complete it. 

I might use that initial screen to add some buttons that can lead to either my website or twitter as a way for people to contact me, also put the logo and my name. Use it as an introduction more than anything. 

Inside the game, I've been missing the idea of implementing any UI (User Interface) as at this point I'm ruling out the idea of having any fighting therefore a health or magic bar is useless. Saying that, I think I want to use the concept of Keara being timid to add a Brave bar which in reality would only measure the progress of the game; this would be reflecting the character getting the courage to scape the level. I think this would help to the understanding of the character and slightly increase the immersiveness. 

Also to add some sort of decoration I've made a 'frame' that goes around the edges of the screen. any bar or dialogue would be embedded around this edges to unify the UI. So far this is only a test. This frame will follow the camera, so it will always maintain the same position. At the moment I'm trying to implement some sort of camera movement that will zoom in and out depending on the character's movement, so hopefully that doesn't get in the way of this UI. 

When I look at some examples of games in respect of their UI, I can see some very simplistic involving some basic information, other (like some RPGs) have a huge range of boxes, icons and menus hanging all around the screen. I suppose my project don't involve much at the moment, and I definitely don't want to add stuff that's not needed, yet I want to emulate the look of a professional game in as many aspects as I can. 

I've found this artist called Sue Hatfield that on her portfolio she has some very nice user interface that include some sort of decoration. I really don't want to make anything too distracting or that takes up too much space on the screen (maybe I'll even reduce the frame I have), but I would like something that adds some decorative value to the screen.