What does this do then!? A quick overview of Unity’s UI

While at first glance, the Unity UI may appear daunting and complicated, it all very quickly becomes second nature. Let’s take a closer look.

Scene View

The Scene View is where you’ll spend most of your time. This is where we can manipulate our scene’s GameObjects and build our game.

Tool Selection Bar

This is where we can access various tools with which we can manipulate our GameObjects.

These buttons are also mapped to the ‘QWERTY’ keys.

The combined tool is a little tricky to get used to and as such is not recommended for beginners.

Hierarchy

You should think of the Hierarchy as your current scene’s contents or index. Everything in the Hierarchy is referred to as a GameObject (regardless of the type of app we’re building) and every GameObject that you have in your scene (whether visible or not) will be listed here.

Project Window

The Project Window contains the file structure of our project. In here you can create new folders, scripts, materials, animations, import custom packages and more.

Be sure to keep this organized!

Inspector

The Inspector contains all of the configuration options for our currently selected GameObject.

You will notice ALL GameObjects have a common component called ‘Transform’. As you can see, this holds the position, rotation and scale information on the GameObject. We can manipulate those values here as well as in the Scene View.

Also, each GameObject will have components specific to itself. We can add, remove and edit any component on a GameObject through the Inspector.

Play Mode Buttons

Here, we can test out our game by using the Play and Pause buttons. While Paused, we can also step through our game one frame at a time.

Game Window

This is where we can preview our finished product, the field of view is determined by the currently active Camera. While in Design mode, any changes made in the scene will be shown here in real time. In Play mode, this is where we test out our game’s features.