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Mastering UI Development with Unity

By : Dr. Ashley Godbold

4.5 (4)

Buy this Book

Mastering UI Development with Unity

4.5 (4)

By: Dr. Ashley Godbold

Buy this Book

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

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Free Chapter

Designing User Interfaces

UI and GUI

Four game interface types

Layout

Color schemes

Interface metaphors

Resolution and aspect ratio

Summary

Canvases, Panels, and Basic Layouts

UI Canvas

UI Panel

Rect Transform

Anchor and Pivot Point

Canvas Group component

Introducing UI Text and Image

Examples

Summary

Automatic Layouts

Types of Automatic Layout Groups

Layout Element

Fitters

Examples

Summary

The Event System and Programming for UI

Accessing UI elements in code

The Event System

Input Manager

Input functions for buttons and key presses

Input Modules

Event Trigger

Event inputs

Raycasters

Examples

Summary

Buttons

UI Button

Transitions

Examples

Summary

Text, Images, and TextMesh Pro-Text

UI Text

UI Image

UI effect components

TextMesh Pro-Text

Examples

Summary

Masks and Other Inputs

Masks

UI Toggle

UI Slider

UI Scrollbar

UI Scroll View

UI Dropdown and TextMeshPro – Dropdown

UI Input Field

TextMeshPro – Input Field

Examples

Summary

Animations and Particles in the UI

Animation clips

Animator Controller

Particles in the UI

Examples

Summary

World Space UI

When to use World Space

Appropriately scaling text in the Canvas

Other considerations when working in World Space

Examples

Summary

Mobile-Specific UI

Recommended button sizes

Full screen/screen portion taps

The thumb zone

Multi-touch input

Accelerometer and gyroscope

Device resources

Examples

Summary

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Text, Images, and TextMesh Pro-Text

We've spent some time with UI Text and UI Images already, as they are the most basic graphical UI objects. We discussed them briefly in Chapter 2, Canvases, Panels, and Basic Layouts because it was pretty hard to start laying out UI without having anything to display visually. UI Text and UI Images are also subcomponents of the UI elements we covered in the previous chapters, so we've worked with them at their basic level. Now we will discuss these two UI objects more thoroughly so that we can have more control over our UI Text and UI Images. We will also discuss TextMesh Pro-Text objects and how they allow for even more control of the text in our game.

In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics: