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

Animating hearts of the symbolic lives counter


In this recipe, we will discover how to animate the hearts of the symbolic lives counter made in the second chapter. In fact, we will use an Animator controller to handle the animation and use the Animation window to animate them. Also, we want to make all the hearts beat. As a result, the UI will be more dynamic and immersive.

How to do it...

  1. You might remember that when we attached the script created in the Creating a symbolic lives counter recipe in Chapter 2, Implementing Counters and Health Bars, we needed to assign different images (in this case, hearts) in the Inspector. Now select one of them, for instance, Heart1, and then open the Animation window.

  2. Click on Add Property, and Unity will ask you to choose a folder in which you want to save your animation and a name. Just choose one and click on Save.

  3. Next, we should notice that Unity has added an Animator component to our image and filled the controller variable with a controller named Heart1...