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)

Canvases, Panels, and Basic Layouts

Canvases are the core of all Unity UIs. Every single UI element must be included within a Canvas for it to be able to render within a scene. This chapter covers all that you need to create basic UI in Unity.

It's important to start focusing on setting up a UI that will scale at multiple resolutions and aspect ratios early on, as trying to do so later will cause a lot of headache and extra work. This chapter focuses on creating a UI that scales appropriately.

In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:

  • Creating UI Canvases and setting their properties
  • Creating UI Panels and setting their properties
  • Using the Rect Tool and Rect Transform component
  • Properly setting anchor and pivot points
  • How to create and lay out a basic HUD
  • How to create a background image
  • How to set up a basic pop-up menu
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