Good tutorials for UI elements?

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Hi there -

I’m a beginner Unity developer who has spent the last few months learning the basics of C# and the game engine.

During my learning experience, I’ve discovered plenty of tutorials showing how to make a game with a certain set of features - tower defence, RPG, incremental clickers, etc.

However, what seems to be getting covered a lot less are the skills needed to create an attractive UI that goes with such games. For example, while working on an incremental clicker, I probably spent more time figuring out how to make a progress bar move and change its fill speed depending on the level of the player than actually figuring out how to build the basic mechanic of clicking to obtain a desired result.

Consider, for instance, a typical match-3 game - let’s say you get a power-up bonus which you activate and which blows up half the game field. The explosion typically comes with an animation that triggers effects such as removal of objectives, appearance of graphics effects, etc etc.

What / where would be a good place to learn how such animations are made? These subjects don’t let themselves to easy or natural Google queries (e.g., “how to make a match-3 game in Unity” is easy - “how to make a match-3 explosion that removes all game pieces” is a bit more complex").

It would be great if there was a comprehensive resource that offered coverage of the most commonly used UI elements and animations, and how they are developed.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,
George

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I don’t think there is any comprehensive resource like that. The fancy effects you’re talking about are just a combination of simpler effects.

I actually made a game like that in Unity, not too long ago. And yeah, there’s a lot going on, but it’s all stuff that you’ve probably seen by now:

  • sprite animations, played in the usual way (I actually use my own SimpleAnimator in most cases, but the built-in Animator methods would work too)
  • pieces disappearing at the right times, either triggered by animation events or queued up when the animation starts
  • other pieces moving down; I keep a script for each piece with a “target position”, so updating the target makes the piece move smoothly there
  • bonus effects (“3X!” or whatever); just instantiating prefabs
  • etc.

Note that in a game like that, where you have a lot of animated effects that you want to sort of kick off at one point and then forget about, it’s really helpful to have some sort of tweening and call-later functionality. I made heavy use of my own CallLater script in that project, and may have also used DOTween. These make it convenient to say: OK, do this now, do this in 0.4 seconds, do that 1.2 seconds after that, etc.

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Oh, pick me, pick me!!!

My channel has a bunch of stuff for common UI stuff that isn’t in the learn section. Most of it is around the mechanical aspects of making UI.

For the creative aspect, you can’t go past the video recordings from Unite. It can take a while to sort through, but there are plenty of gems on how to create cool visuals there.

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