Getting Started With Unity – Finishing Our Game With a Menu

There are several methods used to produce menus within Unity, the main two being the built in GUI system and using GameObjects with Colliders that respond to interactions with the mouse. Unity’s GUI system can be tricky to work with so we’re going to use the GameObject approach which I think is also a bit more fun for what we’re trying to achieve here.

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Final Result Preview

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

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Step 1: Determine Your Game Resolution

Before designing a menu you should always determine what resolution you are going to serve it to. Open the Player settings via the top menu, Edit > Project Settings > Player and enter your default screen width and height values into the inspector. I chose to leave mine as the default 600x450px as shown below.

You then need to adjust the size of your Game view from the default "Free Aspect" to "Web (600 x 450)", else you could be positioning your menu items off the screen.

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Step 2: Choosing a Menu Background

As you will have seen in the preview, our menu scene is going to have our game environment in the background so that when you click Play you enter seamlessly into the game. To do this you need to position your player somewhere in the scene where you like the background and round up the Y rotation value. This is so it’s easier to remember and to replicate later, so that the transition can be seamless from the menu into the game.

Let’s now get on with the creation of the menu scene!

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Step 3: Creating the Menu Scene

Make sure your scene is saved and is called "game" – you’ll see why later. Select the game scene within the Project view and duplicate it using Ctrl/Command + D, then rename the copy to "menu" and double-click it to open it. Note: You can confirm which scene is open by checking the top of the screen, it should say something like "Unity – menu.unity – ProjectName – Web Player / Stand Alone". You don’t want to start deleting parts accidently from your game scene! Now select and delete the GUI and PickupSpawnPoints GameObjects from the Hierarchy. Expand the "Player" and drag the "Main Camera" so that it’s no longer a child of the Player, then delete the Player.

Next, select the terrain and remove the Terrain Collider Component by right-clicking and selecting Remove Component. Finally, select the "Main Camera" and remove the MouseLook Component by right-clicking and selecting Remove Component. If you run the game now nothing should happen and you shouldn’t be able to move at all. If you can move or rotate then redo the above steps.

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Step 4: Adjusting the Build Settings

Currently when you build or play your game the only level included within that build is the "game" scene. This means that the menu scene will never appear. So that we can test our menu, we’ll adjust the build settings now. From the top menu select File > Build Settings and drag the menu scene from your Project View into the Build Settings’ "Scenes In Build" list as shown below

(Make sure you rearrange the scenes to put "menu.unity" at the top, so that it’s the scene that’s loaded first when the game is played.) Perfect![...]
Read more: Getting Started With Unity – Finishing Our Game With a Menu

Quick comments about Unity and premium features

I’m sitting at the Seattle airport at the moment but I just wanted to clarify a couple of things about the announcements we made last night. Firstly we announced that we now have a partnership in place with Unity. Our teams working together will make their Flash export feature even better in the future. Big shout out to Ralph and the Unity for their awesome work on it!
The second thing we announced is a new premium feature model for the desktop browser runtime. This model is there to allow Adobe to make revenue from large, web-based Flash games like the ones that we expect to come out of Unity and other tools. Building a real game platform means that we have to be able to make revenue to fund its development. When talking with game companies at GDC, most prefer this model because they are much more confident about deploying to a platform that we are actively making money from.
So in a nutshell this is what the premium features mean. If you create a game that uses Stage3D GPU AND uses the Alchemy opcodes then you will need to get a license key from Adobe. Then if your game makes over $50,000 in revenue, your game will subject to a 9% revenue share that you will pay to Adobe. This does not apply at all to Adobe AIR. So you can use Stage3D and the opcodes as much as you want with no license. I have seen a lot of chatter online basically saying that people will have to pay a cut to Adobe in addition to the cut Apple and Google take. This is completely false. There is NO licensing needed when deploying to mobile.
I know there are a tons of edge cases here surrounding the use of the opcodes and I will be writing more in-depth about them very soon. Read through the two links below to get more details.
Premium features overview
Premium features FAQ
Read more: Quick comments about Unity and premium features

FREE Unity3D Mobile Basic (Android and iOS)

That’s exactly what your just read: the Unity3D Mobile Basic (Android and iOS), which costs $400 each,  is completely FREE until April 8th.  It is not a trial! Head to the Unity3D web store and download your copy.

The Unity3D Mobile Basic license allows you to develop games targeting the Android and the iOS platforms. Even though this is not a Pro license (which has lots of heavy weaponry), you still can use cutting edge technologies to create amazing games. Check this page to compare the different licenses.

Thanks Unity Technologies for that!

Read more: FREE Unity3D Mobile Basic (Android and iOS)