So far in our efforts to create an animated pause menu, we have set up the required UI elements for the menu, and created the animation clip that will drive the transition between the paused and unpaused states of the game. Now, we’re going to move ahead and set up the Animator Controller that will actually handle the user’s request to pause or unpause.

In our Unity3D project, click the Canvas gameObject in the inspector, then open the Animator window (as far as I know, there is no hotkey for this, but you can find it in Window menu under the Animator label). You should see a fresh animator editor with three states: Any State, Entry, and Pause (or whatever you called the pause animation that we created in step 2), with a transition from Entry to Pause. …

Following the setup of all the UI elements for the pause menu in part one, we’re now going to create an animation for the transition between the unpaused and paused states of the game. As a reminder, here’s a preview of the finished state of the pause menu, showing the transition animation:

[caption id=”attachment_152" align=”aligncenter” width=”825"]

Pause Menu in Action[/caption]

Before we get started, let’s talk a little bit about animation in Unity3D. Unity’s animation system, Mecanim, uses curves to represent motion. Most commonly, these motion curves drive the movement of 3D models, but you can actually use Mecanim to animate any public property that Unity knows how to serialize. …

Today, we’re going to start building an animated pause menu in Unity3D. We’ll go through setting up the UI, animating the UI elements, creating the animator controller / state machine to transition from unpaused to paused, and actually pausing the game in response to player input. We’ll even get into a bit of polish and shine by making the game visible but blurred while the game is paused.

Here’s a preview of the finished product:

[caption id=”attachment_152" align=”aligncenter” width=”825"]

Pause Menu in Action (click for higher quality)[/caption]

Setting up the UI

Let’s get started! First things first, we’ll want to add a UI canvas (Create > UI > Canvas) if the scene doesn't already have one. Since part of the pause animation involves the various components swooping in from off-screen, we want to make sure that our pause menu elements never accidentally appear on screen until we want them to. …

Let’s take a look at some common problems and anti-patterns when using lerp in Unity, and how to correct them.

Anti-pattern #1: lerping with Time.time

We want to move a GameObject to a target point over time, so we lerp between a starting point and a destination, using Time.time as the t value.

void Update () {
  if (Input.GetMouseButton(0)) {
    transform.position = Vector3.Lerp(startPosition, targetPosition, Time.time);  // this won't work as expected!
  }
}

The Problem

As discussed previously, the lerp function produces a value that is some percentage of the distance between two known points, where that percentage is represented by a number in the range of 0 to 1 inclusive. Time.time …

If you’ve ever wanted to change a player’s health bar from green to red as they take damage, figure out the damage of an attack based on the power level, or smoothly transition from darkness to light in your level design, chances are you’ve used a linear interpolation, or “lerp”, operation. …

Have you ever wanted to animate multiple UI elements at once in Unity? Unity3D 4.6 brought with it the long-awaited Unity GUI (or uGUI) system, and with that, a lot of potential for creating great in-game UIs. When building your game’s UI, you will probably want to animate different aspects of it, whether that’s sliding a menu in from off-screen, fading in text, or any of a number of other effects. …

I recently wrote a small Slack integration for my gaming group. I wanted to handle dice rolls for tabletop games, so I needed to match patterns like 1d8, d20+2, or 2d6-4. I wrote a simple regex to handle it, which could probably be greatly improved, but works for my use case: /(\d+)?d(\d+)([\+\-]\d+)?/i (you can play with it on RegExr).

With ES5, I probably would have done something like this with the regex match results:

var matches = rollString.match(rollRegex);
var count = matches[1] || 1;
var die = matches[2];
var modifier = matches[3] || 0;

With ES6’s destructuring syntax, it becomes much cleaner (and in fact, there’s actually a section doing just this sort of thing in the…

I recently set up Unity Cloud Build so I could take it for a test drive, and while I was walking through the setup instructions, I came across a bit that was really concerning:

Please, please, please don’t do this. Adding an SSH key to your account like this is essentially giving the Unity Cloud Build tool unlimited read/write access to all of your repositories; you are in effect saying, “Unity Cloud Build can access all of my repos as if it were me.” Even if you trust Unity not to misuse this ability (most likely a safe bet, but not one I want to take), there is still the possibility of potentially destructive code errors or the possibility that Unity’s servers are compromised and attackers gain access to an SSH key that has read/write access to your code. …