Book Image

Mastering UI Development with Unity

By : Ashley Godbold
Book Image

Mastering UI Development with Unity

By: Ashley Godbold

Overview of this book

A functional UI is an important component for player interaction in every type of video game. Along with imparting crucial statistical information to the player, the UI is also the window through which the player engages with the world established by the game. Unity's tools give you the opportunity to create complex and attractive UIs to make your game stand out. This book helps you realize the full potential of Unity's powerful tools to create the best UI for your games by walking you through the creation of myriad user interface components. Learn how to create visually engaging heads-up-displays, pause menus, health bars, circular progress bars, animated menus, and more. This book not only teaches how to lay out visual elements, but also how to program these features and implement them across multiple games of varying genres. While working through the examples provided, you will learn how to develop a UI that scales to multiple screen resolutions, so your game can be released on multiple platforms with minimal changes.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Designing User Interfaces

When working with UI, it is important to understand a few design basics. This chapter will cover the foundation of designing UI as well as a few key concepts to start you off in the right direction.

In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:

  • Defining UI and GUI
  • Describing the four types of interfaces
  • Choosing a UI layout and color scheme
  • Defining interface metaphors
  • Discerning and setting resolution and aspect ratio

This book is not about the art of designing UI. It is a technical text that discusses implementation of UI functionality. However, I do want to discuss some basic design principles of UI design. I don't expect you to be an amazing UI artist after reading this chapter. I do hope that you get some basic understanding of layout and design principles from this chapter, though, so that maybe your artist friends won't make too much fun of you.