As we have seen in the previous section, designing UI can be tough, and requires experience to get into, especially if you take into consideration all the elements you should, such as the psychology of your audience. However, this is just half way through. In fact, designing is one thing, making it work is another. Usually, in large teams, there are artists who design the UI and programmers who implement it.

Is UI programming that different? Well, the answer is no, programming is still programming; however, it's quite an interesting branch of the field of programming. If you are building your game engine from scratch, implementing an entire system that handles input is not something you can create just with a couple of hours of work. Catching all of the events that the player does in the game and in the UI is not easy to implement, and requires a lot of practice. Luckily, in the context of Unity, most of this backend for UIs is already done. Furthermore, as we will see in the next section, Unity provides a solid framework to work also on the frontend for UIs. This framework includes different components that can be easily used without knowing anything about programming. But if we are really interested in unlocking the potentiality of Unity framework for the UIs, we not only need to understand it, but also program within it.

Even with a solid framework, such as the one in Unity, UI programming still needs to take into consideration many factors, enough to have a specific role for this in large teams. Achieving exactly what designers have in mind, and possible without hitting the performances too much, is most of the job of an UI programmer (at least using Unity).

Mastering these skills requires time and patience, and this chapter is just an introduction to this world. I hope you will enjoy reading this chapter.