This book is dedicated to beginners of the Next-Gen UI kit, also known as NGUI. You may have heard about this Unity 3D plugin; it is popular amongst developers for its easy-to-use and effective WYSIWYG workflow.
NGUI provides built-in components and scripts to create beautiful user interfaces for your projects, with most of the work happening inside the editor.
Through this book, you will gather the necessary knowledge to create interesting user interfaces. The seven chapters of this book are practical and will guide you through the creation of both a main menu and a 2D game.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with NGUI, describes NGUI's functionalities and workflow. We will then import the plugin and create our first UI system and study its structure.
Chapter 2, Creating Widgets, introduces us to our first widget and explains how we can configure it. It then explains how to create a main menu using the Widget template
Chapter 3, Enhancing Your UI, explains the drag-and-drop system and how to create draggable windows. It also covers the use of animations, scrollable text, and localization with NGUI.
Chapter 4, C# with NGUI, introduces C# event methods and advanced code-oriented components that will be used to create tool tips, notifications, and Tweens through code.
Chapter 5, Building a Scrollable Viewport, introduces us to an interactive fullscreen-scrolling viewport using scroll bars, keyboard arrows, and draggable items.
Chapter 6, Atlas and Font Customization, explains how you can customize your UI using your own sprites and fonts; this will enable us to modify the appearance of our entire main menu.
Chapter 7, Creating a Game with NGUI, covers game features, such as spawning mobile enemies, handling player input, and detecting collisions between widgets to create a game.