Pause menus / Equipment screens.

Hi! I've tried finding help about this specific issue, but I've found nothing on it so I was wondering if you guys could help me.

I am currently making a platformer that will use two types of menu, RPG-style. So long I've been able to set the time scale to 0 and make the menu layer visible when 'Esc' is pressed. However, this also makes it unable to play animations, which I want to use on the various buttons and such.

So my first question here would be if there is a way to pause individual layers, or to control the time scale of each one independently. This is not only because I want to make the buttons animate when hovered over with the mouse, but also for the various elements of the pause menu itself, which brings me to my next question:

The pause screen is divided into diferent panels, which are "dragged" from the borders of the screen. I would like the game to spawn them from outside the screen and then drag them into view, but so far I have only seen one "move" option, and the only direction available is "forward", while I would like it to move them sideways to the right, left, up or down without changing the angle. Is there a way to do this?

Move At Angle instead of Move Forward will move it in the direction you want.

As for "pausing" the game to display menus you dont actually pause anythin you set a global variable for paused then check against it for your actions.

Paused = 1 then player and enemies dont move and/or animate. Show menus and allow menu controls.

Paused = 0 then game continues like normal

Thats one approach. Or you can disable/activate groups to achieve the same effect

Right, so what you are saying is that I should include a "paused" state and an "unpaused" one in every object it would be relevant to do so, and just assign the "pause" key to switch the variable. That is actually pretty smart, but I'll look into grouping in hopes I can find a more practical solution. The "Move at angle" thingy is a lifesaver though, just what I was looking for.

Thanks a lot! :D