Unity has events that tell your scripts when the mouse cursor hovers over an object and stops hovering over an object. This can be great for UI or for prompting the player that they they can interact with something. Note: this is an older post that uses the old Unity input system. This will still … Read moreInput: Detect Mouseover
Many games show dialogue with a popup speech bubble, or prompt you to press an action button when you approach an object. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a popup UI object that can be used for any kind of popup need in your Unity game, using Unity’s flexible UI system. Here’s … Read moreSpeech Bubbles and Popup UI
This is a short ‘Making of’ for my first Unity game, Game of Clowns. Background Game of Clowns is a physics puzzle game in the tradition of Amazing Alex and The Incredible Machine. It’s my second game, but my first made in Unity. I was totally new to Unity and C# when I embarked on making this game. A … Read moreThe Making of Game of Clowns
Following on from my previous article explaining drag-and-drop functionality, I’d like to show you how to implement ‘snapping’ objects to a specific place, such as a Scrabble grid: How does it work? We will create a simple Scrabble/Words with Friends demo, with a few tiles that can be dragged onto a board grid, so we’ll: … Read moreWord Game Drag-and-Snap
Unity’s LineRenderer component gives you the ability to draw lines with multiple segments. You can use this to draw anything line based, like a rope or a finger drawing. This tutorial is for intermediate users: I will expect you to know your way around Unity reasonably well and understand basic code without explanation. Please see … Read moreDrawing Lines with LineRenderer
The coolest new character in Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens is BB-8, the droid that rolls on his spherical body with his head bopping along on top. It’s a great design and fun a character. Here’s how to achieve a 2D BB-8 in Unity. The Basics The HeadMovement script is the part that is … Read more2d BB-8
Wherever Unity is discussed I see a mistake repeated by new Unity developers. It’s not a dumb or obvious mistake, but it can be a costly one. It’s the use of Unity’s ‘find’ functions to locate gameobjects and components inside update methods. Here’s the kind of thing I’m talking about: That line of code is … Read moreStop Looking, You Already Found It!
Drag-and-drop functionality is useful for many types of games – an inventory system in an RPG, dragging letters onto a word game board, etc. With a simple script you can add drag-and-drop functionality that will work with both mouse and touch input. This is also a perfect problem with which to demonstrate my technique for simplifying complex … Read moreDrag-and-Drop
You can use Unity’s RenderTexture functionality to create some cool effects, and in this tutorial I’ll show you how to create an in-game security camera that projects a camera’s view onto an in-game TV screen. What is a Render Texture? A Render Texture is a texture you can draw onto, and then use like any … Read moreIn-Game Security Camera using Render Texture
Unity lacks a way to pass parameters to a new scene. If you want to send some game state data to the next level you have several options, such as PlayerPrefs or persistent classes, but they are not always elegant solutions. I decided to copy NavigationHelper from Windows Store apps. NavigationHelper allows you to send an object when navigating to a new … Read moreA Navigation Helper for Unity