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)

Input Modules

Input Modules describe how the Event System will handle the inputs to the game via the mouse, keyboard, touchscreen, gamepad, and such. You can think of them as the bridge between the hardware and events.

There are four input modules provided by Unity:

  • Standalone Input Module
  • Hololens Input Module
  • Base Input Module
  • Pointer Input Module

To utilize these input modules, you attach them to your EventSystem GameObject.

You are not restricted to using these four input modules and can create your own, so if you have an input device that is not covered by one of those four, you'd create your own input module script and then attach it to the Event System.

Until the recent version of Unity, there was another input module called Touch Input Module, which was necessary for touchscreen inputs. However, this module has been depreciated and its functionality is now lumped...