The Ease of Building UI Elements In Unity

The tools in Unity are simple and easy to use and that is one of the most astounding things in Unity!

Today we are going to focus on the built-in features for building your User interface.

What is a User Interface (UI)?

A User Interface is a game or program’s visual display of information to the player.

The most commonly recognized example of a UI is the HUD (Heads Up Display) which is the visual UI elements attached to an overlay over the game’s camera. The HUD affixes certain elements to it such as health/experience bars, menus, dialogue, mini maps, and more.

What is a GUI?

GUI stands for Graphical User Interface and is an element of the UI that includes graphical controls such as buttons that you can click on, or even button prompts that appear in order to tell the player when they should press a certain button to perform certain actions such as opening doors, talking to NPC’s, etc.

What makes up a UI?

Any UI element that you create will be displayed on the “Canvas” game object.

Any elements that allow for interaction with the UI such as Buttons will utilize another game object called the “Event System”.

Both the “Canvas” and the “Event System” will be automatically generated into your scene if you don’t already have them in your hierarchy and you create a UI game object.