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

Making a button that changes color


In this recipe, we will see the first basic customization that we can allow the player to do. This customization will allow him to change the color of a button by clicking on it, and then switch between two colors. In this way, you will learn how it is possible to use events to customize buttons when the player interacts with them.

How to do it...

  1. In the first step, we have to create our UI button. Right-click on the Hierarchy panel, then go to UI | Button, and rename it to ChangeColorButton. Of course, it is possible to resize the button, change Source Image, the text, and place it as we wish in Canvas.

  2. Now, it's already time to write our script to handle the whole process. Select ChangeColorButton and, in the Inspector, navigate to Add Component | New Script. Name it ChangeColorButtonScript, and then click on Create and Add.

  3. Double-click on the script in order to edit it. Next, we have to add the using UnityEngine.UI; statement at the beginning of the script...