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)

TextMesh Pro-Text

There is a bit of limitation to what you can do with UI Text. Luckily, there is TextMeshPro. TextMesh Pro is a Unity asset that allows for significantly more text control. Additionally, its rendering allows text to appear crisp at more resolutions and point sizes than possible with the standard UI Text. TextMesh Pro used to be a paid asset in the Unity Asset Store, but it was adopted by Unity around March 2017 and is available for free now. Unity has stated that they will be implementing TextMesh Pro in Unity 2017, but at the time of writing this chapter, has not done so yet. However, it is a safe bet to assume that it will be implemented in Unity soon and will not need to be downloaded as a separate asset. It may eventually replace UI Text entirely, but it is not entirely clear at this time whether that will happen.

You can download the TextMesh Pro asset for...