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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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Animations and Particles in the UI

Since we have already discussed how to create animation transitions for buttons (Chapter 5, Buttons), in this chapter, we'll take a look at animation transitions more thoroughly and discuss how to create animations for UI elements in a more general sense.

This chapter will demonstrate how to create animations within the UI and use Particle systems within the UI.

In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:

Applying animations to the various UI elements
Displaying particle systems in front of UI elements
Creating a pop-up window that fades in and out
Creating a complex animation system with a State Machine and Animation Events

As with previous chapters, all of the examples shown in this section can be found within the Unity project provided in the code bundle. They can be found within the scene labeled Chapter8Text in the Assets...

Tech Concepts

Programming languages

Tech Tools