March 1, 2019
Tower Defense Tutorial
Episode 22 – Main Menu
Youtube – How to make a Tower Defense Game (E22 MAIN MENU) – Unity Tutorial
By: Brackeys
Ep. 22
In this tutorial we created the Main Menu scene for the game.
We duplicated the original game scene to start, and deleted out everything except the Light, Main Camera, and Environment. Then we only kept the Ground Plane from the environment. We then added a Standard Turret Prefab to be a central object for our menu.
We then edited the sky box to something other than the Unity default. We selected Solid Color for it, and used the color picker to pick the top most color of our ground plane so the sky matched this very final gradient of color. This made it seem like the background was one solid, endless color gradient for the most part.
We then created a World Space canvas with text fitted to it for our PLAY text. We placed this on top of the turret prefab in our menu. We then wanted to make this text clickable, so we just added a Button (script) component. This basically turned the text into a button for us. We could even add our previous animation by simply adding an Animator component and selected our Button Controller for the Controller.
We then created the MainMenu script which will hold the main functionality of this scene. This started by creating public Play and Quit methods for our Play Button and Quit Button. Quit was just Application.Quit, and Play loaded our MainLevel scene.
Finally, we added a bit of animation to our Main Menu to utilize the fact it is set in a 3D environment. We added the two button canvases as children to the PartToRotate object of the turret, and created a quick animation for that that just rotated the entire turret and UI element back and forth a bit over time. This really made the menu feel alive and 3D.
SUMMARY
- To set current editor view as camera view: select camera and press: Ctrl + Shift + F
- Set skybox to solid color and use color picker to select farthest/top most color of ground plane for a quick/easy way to make ground and sky look like one coherent background
- When referencing scene names, make a string and set its value to that scene name so if at any point you want to change the scene name, you just change that string variable’s value and it will fix it in all locations needed