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)

UI Dropdown and TextMeshPro – Dropdown

There are two Dropdown UI objects available, the UI Dropdown object packaged in Unity and the TextMeshPro—Dropdown object that comes with the TextMeshPro asset we discussed in Chapter 6, Text, Images, and TextMesh Pro-Text. Both the Dropdown objects allow the user to select from a list of options. The list becomes visible when the Dropdown is clicked on. Once an object is selected from the list, the list will collapse, making the chosen option visible within the Dropdown (if desired).

The two Dropdown options are pretty much identical in the way they work. The only difference between the two is the UI Dropdown uses UI Text objects to display text while the TextMeshPro - Dropdown uses TextMeshPro - Text objects. Due to this, I will discuss the two objects at the same time in this section. Additionally, because the two objects...