Unity Tutorial 06

Screenshot of my progress in Unity - RIP Jambi

  

For this week’s Unity tutorials we were introduced to adding a User Interface or UI in the game. It was our first time covering this part of game creation, so it was fun first part of the tutorial. To include a UI in our game we added a Canvas game component to our hierarchy. Another game object was automatically imported called EventSystem that focused on how the player would interact with the UI. However we didn’t work with this for this part of the tutorial.

 The Rect Transform component had various screen settings for how the UI should be displayed in the player’s screen.  For this tutorial, we left it at the default option – screen space overlay which essentially renders the UI above all the other game objects making it easier to see.

We were also introduced to static members to easily call our UI script without the need to reference which makes the process much simpler as we only need to include the keyword ‘static’ in the UI HealthBar instance and using that bit of code will let us access that property anywhere in our scripts.

The next tutorial was still linked to UI.  We included a friendly frog NPC, Jambi, where a dialog box would appear when the player presses the ‘X’ key to ‘ talk’ to Jambi. This works using a feature in Unity’s physics system known as raycasting. The code for the raycast was put on Ruby, once the  player presses the ‘X’ key,  a ray is cast from Ruby a certain distance. If that ray detects the collider of another game object, like Jambi, then the dialog box will appear.

 Unfortunately, Jambi ghosted me when working on my tutorial. He was invisible but the dialog box would still appear and I could see his bounding box when I click on it. I tried to fix the issue with the sorting layers but it didn’t seem to work. Hopefully he’ll make an appearance before the end of the tutorials. 😜