How to Make GameObject Gradually Decrease in Size

Unity Engine
,
1

For my mobile game project, I need one of my game objects to gradually decrease in size immediately after the screen is pressed. I’ve tried using linear interpolation to change the scale of the object, but this made the object shrink extremely fast, and I wasn’t able to adjust how quickly it shrank.

2

Linear interpolation of localScale is indeed the way to do this. Here’s a simple example:

public class Shrinker : MonoBehaviour {
  // Time it takes in seconds to shrink from starting scale to target scale.
  public float ShrinkDuration = 5f;

  // The target scale
  public Vector3 TargetScale = Vector3.one * .5f;

  // The starting scale
  Vector3 startScale;

  // T is our interpolant for our linear interpolation.
  float t = 0;

  void OnEnable() {
    // initialize stuff in OnEnable
    startScale = transform.localScale;
    t = 0;
  }

  void Update() {
    // Divide deltaTime by the duration to stretch out the time it takes for t to go from 0 to 1.
    t += Time.deltaTime / ShrinkDuration;

    // Lerp wants the third parameter to go from 0 to 1 over time. 't' will do that for us.
    Vector3 newScale = Vector3.Lerp(startScale, TargetScale, t);
    transform.localScale = newScale;
 
    // We're done! We can disable this component to save resources.
    if (t > 1) {
      enabled = false;
    }
  }
}

Just set the ShrinkDuration and TargetScale to whatever you want.

2 Likes
3

@PraetorBlue That worked perfectly, thank you!