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.

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Free Chapter

Designing User Interfaces

Designing User Interfaces

Four game interface types

Interface metaphors

Resolution and aspect ratio

Canvases, Panels, and Basic Layouts

Canvases, Panels, and Basic Layouts

Anchor and Pivot Point

Canvas Group component

Introducing UI Text and Image

Automatic Layouts

Automatic Layouts

Types of Automatic Layout Groups

The Event System and Programming for UI

The Event System and Programming for UI

Accessing UI elements in code

The Event System

Input functions for buttons and key presses

Buttons

Text, Images, and TextMesh Pro-Text

Text, Images, and TextMesh Pro-Text

UI effect components

TextMesh Pro-Text

Masks and Other Inputs

Masks and Other Inputs

UI Dropdown and TextMeshPro – Dropdown

TextMeshPro – Input Field

Animations and Particles in the UI

Animations and Particles in the UI

Animation clips

Animator Controller

Particles in the UI

World Space UI

When to use World Space

Appropriately scaling text in the Canvas

Other considerations when working in World Space

Mobile-Specific UI

Mobile-Specific UI

Recommended button sizes

Full screen/screen portion taps

Multi-touch input

Accelerometer and gyroscope

Device resources

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Summary

Now we know all sorts of techniques for laying out our UI elements. The information covered in this chapter, and the last one, has provided enough tools to create almost any UI layout that you can imagine.

In this chapter, we discussed the following topics:

Using Layout Group components to automatically space, position, and align a group of UI objects
Using the Layout Element component, the Content Size Fitter component, and Aspect Ratio Fitter component to resize UI elements
How to set up a horizontal HUD selection menu
How to set up a grid inventory

In the next chapter, we will learn how to access UI components via code and how to use the Event System to allow the player to interact with the UI objects.