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)

Examples

Now let's jump into some examples! We'll be creating a layout for a basic heads-up-display (HUD) and a background image that stretches with the screen and scales at multiple resolutions.

Before we begin setting up our UI, let's set up our project and bring in the art assets we will need.

We'll begin by setting up our project:

  1. Create a new Unity Project and name it Master Unity UI Project. Create it in the 2D mode.
We're selecting 2D Mode because it will make importing our UI sprites a lot easier. When in 2D Mode, all images import as Sprite (2D and UI) images rather than Texture images, as they do in 3D Mode. You can change to 3D Mode at any time by navigating to Edit | Project Settings | Editor and changing Mode to 3D.
  1. Create three new folders named Scenes, Scripts, and Sprites:
You don't need the Editor folder, but, if you'd...