Mobile Game Development with Unity

Chapter 13. Audio, Menus, Death, and Explosions!

The core gameplay of your space shooter is done, but it’s not a complete game yet. In order to be playable outside of Unity, you’ll need to add menus and other controls that let the player navigate around the game as an application. Finally, we’ll polish up the game by replacing the temporary art with higher-fidelity 3D models and materials.

Menus

Right now, the gameplay is entirely constrained to the editor’s Play button. When you start the game, you’re in the action immediately, and if your space station is destroyed, you have to stop the game and start it again.

To provide the player with a little more context for their game, we need to add menus. In particular, we need to add an especially important button: “New Game.” If the space station is destroyed, we need a way to let the player start again.

Adding the menu structure to a game goes a long way toward making the game feel complete. We’ll be adding four components as part of the menus:

Main Menu

This screen presents the game’s title, and shows the New Game button.

Paused screen

This screen shows the text “Paused,” and contains a button to unpause.

Game Over screen

This screen shows Game Over and the New Game buttons.

In-Game UI

This screen contains the joystick, indicators, Fire button, and everything else that the player actually sees while playing the game.

Each of these UI groups will be exclusive—only one will appear at a time. The game will start with the ...