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)

When to use World Space

There are many reasons you may want to use a World Space Canvas. The most common reasons for using this rendering mode are the following:

  • To have better control of individual UI objects' positions in relation to objects in the scene
  • To rotate or curve the UI elements

For example, the game Mojikara: Japanese Trainer uses World Space Canvases to have rotated panels and keep UI objects, such as Text, attached to 3D objects. As you can see from the following screenshot, the panel on the left is rotated just slightly in 3D space, because it is on a World Space Canvas:

Image provided by Lisa Walkosz-Migiacio, Intropy Games

Another example of rotated UI can be found in the game Cloudbase Prime, as shown in the following screenshot. It also used World Space rendering to provide create indicators that hover over objects and characters.

Image provided by...