Four UI Iterations: What I Learned About Feedback

One of the hardest things to learn in Unity was how to use the UI system.

One of the best parts of Unity is how many different things you can do. To this day, I still find myself learning new things about the engine. One of examples of this is the UI system. It offers so many different kinds of UI components like buttons, sliders, toggle buttons, and others. This made it very daunting at first.

When I made my first original game Murder Mystery game, one of the hardest parts was getting the UI to scale correctly. At the time, I didn't know that there was a specific feature to lockdown the size instead of having it scale based on different screen sizes. My first attempt was overly cluttered as well. Instead of using only a couple of Canvas, I made a new canvas for every single UI tool I used. Nevertheless, it was still very fun to experiment with the UI system. Murder Mystery game's clue mechanic relied solely on toggles and the interrogate feature worked because of buttons. The story-based nature of the game meant I used a lot of buttons which ultimately allowed me to learn so much about the UI system.

One of coolest things, in my opinion, was my confetti win screen. After the player guessed the murderer correctly, they would be displayed a rainbow confetti particle system, a congratulatory message, and two buttons: restart or quit. This game was the first time I added in a start screen and a win screen which were both very cool.

My UI journey would be temporarily put on hold while I was working on my Sharpshooter because it didn't really require as much UI as my previous game.

But when I started working on my new infinite runner, I continued to improve my UI skills. This time I carried over the start screen and end screen features of Murder Mystery and expanded it. My new start screen featured the ability for the user to select the gender of the player and the level they wanted to play. I added in a slider that tracked the user's progress in getting enough points to move to the next level and finally figured out how to prevent the UI from shifting in size.

These skills would then be applied to Whisker.

But, it was really Whisker 2 that I expanded my UI knowledge again. This time new development was adding in a pause panel and a settings panel.

The experience at COSMOS made me realize that UI wasn't just for visual flair, but to improve user accessibility too!