Book Image

Unity UI Cookbook

By : Francesco Sapio
Book Image

Unity UI Cookbook

By: Francesco Sapio

Overview of this book

With the increasing interest in game development, it's essential to design and implement a UI that reflects the game settings and shows the right information to the player. The Unity system is used to create complex and aesthetically pleasing user interfaces in order to give a professional look and feel to a game. Although the new Unity UI system is powerful and quite easy to use, by integrating it with C# scripts, it's possible to realize the potential of this system and bring an impressive UI to games. This guide is an invaluable collection of recipes if you are planning to use Unity to develop a game. Starting with the basic concepts of the UI components, we’ll take you all the way through to creating complex interfaces by including animations and dynamics elements. Based on real-world problems, these recipes will start by showing you how to make common UI elements such as counters and healthbars. You will then get a walkthrough of how to manage time using timers, and will learn how to format them. You will move on to decorating and animating the UI elements to vivify them and give them a professional touch. Furthermore, you will be guided into the 3D UI world and into HUD scripting. Finally, you will discover how to implement complex minimaps in the interface.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unity UI Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating a symbolic lives counter


This recipe teaches us how to use multiple Image (Script) components inside a script in order to create a symbolic lives counter. The number of lives are not displayed as a number, but with heart symbols on the screen. It is similar to the counter in the Implementing a lives counter recipe, but the logic to manage different icons is different.

How to do it...

  1. To begin, let's create a new empty game object. To do this, right-click on the Canvas object, since we want it as parent, and then Create Empty. Finally, rename it as SymbolicLivesCounter.

    Tip

    If there isn't the Canvas object in the scene, for example, in new scenes, we can create it by right-clicking on Hierarchy panel and then go to UI | Canvas.

  2. Next, click on SymbolicLivesCounter and add a new image by selecting UI | Image, and then rename the object just created as Heart1.

  3. Take a heart icon image, or create on our own, and import it in to our project. If our project is not set as 2D, remember to set the...