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)

Full screen/screen portion taps

Many have a single input where you can tap anywhere on the screen to make an action happen. For example, endless runners tend to allow the player to tap or press-and-hold anywhere on the screen to jump. To achieve this, you only have to add an invisible button that covers the whole screen and receives Events. If you have another UI that receives inputs, it needs to be in front of the fullscreen button so that the button does not block the inputs to the other UI items.

Some games require that you tap in specific regions of the screen to perform specific actions. For example, I created a game called Sequence Seekers for my doctoral dissertation. This game included a down-the-mountain mode in which the player had to tap the left-or right-hand side of the screen to move left or right in the game. I achieved this by adding invisible buttons that covered...