Unity UI Cookbook

Key Features

• Design and develop interactive and professional user interfaces (UIs) for games in Unity
• Discover how to implement and deal with various in-game UI elements that will impress your players
• This practical recipe guide will help you to efficiently create powerful and remarkable UIs using C# code

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Implement different kinds of counters and healthbars
• Deal with timers and find out how to format them
• Animate and vivify UI elements
• Handle runtime customizations
• Add complex Head-up displays (HUDs)
• Design and implement 3D UIs
• Integrate minimaps in the UI

About the Author

Francesco Sapio obtained his computer science and control engineering degree from the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, with a couple of semesters in advance, scoring summa cum laude. Now he is studying a master’s of science and engineering in artificial intelligence and robotics.

Besides this, he is a Unity3D expert and skilled game designer, as well as an experienced user of the major graphics programs.

Recently, he has been a reviewer of the book Unity Game Development Scripting, Packt Publishing.

Francesco is also a musician and composer, especially of soundtracks for short films and video games. For several years, he worked as an actor and dancer. He was a guest of honor at the theatre Brancaccio in Rome.

In addition, he is a very active person, having volunteered as a children’s entertainer at the Associazione Culturale Torraccia in Rome. Also, he gives private lessons in mathematics and music to high-school and university students.

Finally, Francesco loves math, philosophy, logic, and puzzle solving, but most of all, creating video games ― thanks to his passion for game designing and programming.

You can find him at https://linkedin.com/pub/francesco-sapio/b8/5b/365.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: UI Essentials
Chapter 2: Implementing Counters and Health Bars
Chapter 3: Implementing Timers
Chapter 4: Creating Panels for Menus
Chapter 5: Decorating the UI
Chapter 6: Animating the UI
Chapter 7: Applying Runtime Customizations
Chapter 8: Applying Runtime Customizations
Chapter 9: Diving into 3D UIs
Chapter 10: Creating Minimaps