Book Image

Unity UI Cookbook

By : Francesco Sapio
Book Image

Unity UI Cookbook

By: Francesco Sapio

Overview of this book

With the increasing interest in game development, it's essential to design and implement a UI that reflects the game settings and shows the right information to the player. The Unity system is used to create complex and aesthetically pleasing user interfaces in order to give a professional look and feel to a game. Although the new Unity UI system is powerful and quite easy to use, by integrating it with C# scripts, it's possible to realize the potential of this system and bring an impressive UI to games. This guide is an invaluable collection of recipes if you are planning to use Unity to develop a game. Starting with the basic concepts of the UI components, we’ll take you all the way through to creating complex interfaces by including animations and dynamics elements. Based on real-world problems, these recipes will start by showing you how to make common UI elements such as counters and healthbars. You will then get a walkthrough of how to manage time using timers, and will learn how to format them. You will move on to decorating and animating the UI elements to vivify them and give them a professional touch. Furthermore, you will be guided into the 3D UI world and into HUD scripting. Finally, you will discover how to implement complex minimaps in the interface.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unity UI Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


In this chapter, we are going to implement different kinds of timers and countdowns. These serve many different purposes in games, such as indicating to the player how much time he has left to complete a level or after how long he will be able to use a certain ability again. Timers are also a good way for players to experience flow throughout the game. On the other hand, countdowns can indicate how much time is remaining to complete a task, depending on the aspect of gameplay that we are trying to represent with a timer — for example, to let a player know how much time is remaining to complete a task, or how much time has elapsed since the task began. Both timers and countdowns are effective methods of altering the dynamics of gameplay.

We will begin this chapter by seeing how to create a numeric timer. From this, you will learn how to create graphic timers and, finally, how to implement a countdown that changes over time.