Unity 5: 2D Advanced UI

Discover game UI design. Learn how to build a start screen, game-over screen, difficulty window, and virtual keyboard—common components of popular 2D and 3D games.

One of the most important aspects of any game is its UI. Your players spend the majority of their time navigating between different game screens, selecting options, and reviewing game progress. This course addresses some ways to build and design the user interface of a game with Unity's new UI system. Here you'll tackle the start screen, game over screen, difficulty window, and virtual keyboard—common components of most popular 2D and 3D games.

Unity expert Jesse Freeman helps you design your UI using custom prefabs (reusable UI elements), UI components such as windows and buttons, simple buildup animations, and transitions. He also helps you create a window manager to guide changes and relationships between windows, and extend the window system with a custom Unity editor that lets you standardize window display and navigation throughout your game.

Introduction

• Welcome
• What you should know
• Exercise files

1. Create UI Prefabs in Unity

• Configure project
• Create a font texture
• Create color palette
• Create label templates
• Create a button prefab
• Create a toggle button prefab

2. Create a Start Screen in Unity

• Create the start screen
• Add a title to the start screen
• Add buttons to the start screen
• Build a window class
• Connect buttons
• Hide the continue button
• Wire buttons

3. Create a Game Over Screen in Unity

• Create a game over screen
• Create a window layout
• Group stats into columns
• Add stats values to the game over screen
• Add buttons to the game over screen
• Resetting the game over window
• Add animation to stats

4. Create a Window Manager

• The window manager
• Transitioning between windows

5. Create a Virtual Keyboard Window

• Build a keyboard window
• The input field
• Add an input cursor
• Lay out the keyboard
• Add navigation to the keyboard
• Add keyboard window buttons

6. Extend the Window System

• Build a custom editor
• Order the windows
• Standardize window navigation
• Generate a window enum

7. Add a Difficulty Window in Unity

• Build the difficulty window
• Connect the difficulty window
• Select difficulty
• Save difficulty selection

Conclusion

• Next steps