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)

Types of Automatic Layout Groups

When a UI object has an automatic layout group component attached to it, all of its children will be aligned, resized, and positioned based on the parameters of the layout component. There are three automatic layout group options: Horizontal Layout Group, Vertical Layout Group, and Grid Layout Group.

The following screenshot shows three panels (represented by gray rectangles), each with six UI image children (represented by the black rectangles): the first panel has a Horizontal Layout Group component, the second panel has a Vertical Layout Group component, and the third panel has a Grid Layout Group component:

Automatic Layout Groups Example 1 in the Chapter3Text Scene

From the preceding screenshot, you can see clearly what the three types of Automatic Layout Groups accomplish. You can use any combination of the three to create nested, perfectly...