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.

---

Final Result Preview

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

---

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.

---

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!

---

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.

---

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