Building Custom Tools to Extend the Unity IDE

Learn how to extend the Unity IDE with custom inspectors, editors, windows, and other tools for speeding up game development.

Unity is a powerful IDE for 2D and 3D game development. But it's even better when you extend it by building your own custom tools. Join Jesse Freeman, as he explores extending the Unity IDE with custom inspectors, editor windows, and other tools for speeding up game development. Learn how to extend the existing inspector by exposing public fields, build custom editor windows, save and load files to the project folder, and more. Plus, learn how to style and skin your tools so they're easier to use. Want to share your customizations with others? When you're done, you can export the new tools to share with colleagues or sell in the Unity Asset Store.

Introduction

• Welcome
• What you should know
• Exercise Files

1. Introduction to the Inspector

• A tour of the Inspector
• Expose variables to the Inspector
• Work with variables
• Variable limitations in the Inspector
• Provide attributes to Inspector fields
• Add custom classes

2. Build Custom Editors in Unity

• Extend the base editor
• Modify what the Inspector displays
• Custom editor limitations

3. Create Custom UI Elements in Unity

• Input field: Strings & numbers
• Pick GameObjects using selection fields
• Add buttons to a custom editor
• Modify the layout of a custom editor

4. Build a Custom Window in Unity

• Build a custom window
• The window life cycle
• Display in a window
• Drag-and-drop support in a window

5. Saving and Loading Data in Unity

• Work with data
• Prepare to save data
• Serialize data
• Write data to the asset folder
• Load data from the asset folder
• Parse data

6. Advanced UI

• Add a reorderable list
• Add callbacks to our reorderable list
• Reskin our reorderable list
• Work with serialized properties
• Hide and show content

7. Skinning Custom Inspectors

• Add boxes to a customer editor
• The message box
• Cleaning up our custom UI
• Standardizing styling
• UI utilities

8. Export Custom Code

• Code organization
• Export and import assets packages

Conclusion

• Next steps