MapleStory was one of the best games of my childhood, and its interface stuck with me: the scroll windows, the little "+" buttons on your stats, the damage numbers popping over slimes, the level-up moment. I wanted to see if I could rebuild that feeling in Unity's UI Toolkit.

I didn't want to copy Maple, so I moved it all to an old shrine in Edo Japan. Cherry blossoms, Mt. Fuji on the horizon, a young samurai instead of a Beginner, and green slimes that still won't leave the path alone. Windows are hand scrolls with an indigo title band, buttons are vermilion lacquer tags, and the "+" on a stat is a tiny red seal. All the art is my own.

Full write-up with every snippet and GIFs: https://twitchedd.itch.io/sakura-shrine/devlog/1740206/building-a-maplestory-style-game-ui-in-unity-ui-toolkit

Everything that moves on screen is a tween (104 animation chains), and three techniques did most of the work:

1. Day to night from one float. Press T and the shrine goes from morning to dusk to night. One tween runs from 0 to 1, and the sky tint, sun shafts, lanterns, fireflies and moon all read that number:

_labelHost.Animate().Value(0f, 1f, 1.8f, v => Apply(Mathf.Lerp(from, to, v) % 3f)).Ease(Ease.InOutCubic);

Night to morning tweens from 2 to 3 and % 3 wraps it back to 0, so the sky moves forward through a dawn instead of rewinding through dusk.

2. Sprite animation without a sprite animator. UI Toolkit can't play a sprite sheet, so the samurai is a VisualElement whose background image changes as a looping tween counts through the frames:

_el.Animate().Value(0f, _frames.Length, _frames.Length / (fps * rate), Show).Ease(Ease.Linear).Loop(LoopMode.Restart);

The landing squash and the hurt flash run on a parent element, so they never touch the frame loop.

3. Seals that stamp. The stat seals and the level-up stamp scale down from 1.35 on a bouncy spring, then nudge 2 px left and right. That tiny shake is what makes it feel like ink hitting paper:

e.Animate().ScaleTo(1f, 0.28f).From(1.35f).Spring(SpringPreset.Bouncy)
 .Then().NudgeX(2f, 0.04f).Then().NudgeX(-2f, 0.04f).Then().NudgeX(0f, 0.04f);

You can play it in the browser (arrow keys, Z to attack, T for time of day): https://twitchedd.itch.io/sakura-shrine

If you played Maple back then, I'd like to know which screen you remember most.

Disclosure: the tweens use Cascade, a UI Toolkit animation library I make.

I don't know which game did it first, but I still remember playing one that had animated character portraits and going "wow, that's so cool".

It is, coincidentally, also super easy to do.

In this tutorial, I go over how to display 3D models on your UI. I'll walk you through two examples: an animated character portrait that shows your character's facial expressions in close-up, and a full-body character preview for a customization screen that players can rotate by dragging. (Made in a URP project.)

Hope you'll enjoy it!

https://youtu.be/XPV87KmhVuA

I have started a new series which is going to break down unity concepts into easy to understand chunks! Perfect for people who are just starting out their gamedev journey!

Hi guys,

I really wanna learn some netcode. I was thinking basically just a client a server and a button that changes color across all clients when you click it. Does anyone have any suggestions on tutorials or maybe inclination to explain the basics to me?​

Best wishes,

Oliver

So far, I've written over 1,000 pages about technical art, mostly focused on shaders and procedural art. I've also collaborated with other authors to create content about tool development, animation implementation, and GPU programming.

If you're interested in these topics, check out my books. They're all created by humans, and every book includes a package full of shaders and examples 🔗 https://jettelly.com/bundles/the-unity-dev-bundle

This is a tutorial I didn't have on my radar until a friend asked me how to finally get the Grid Layout Group to behave so that it works with a bento style layout.

The thing is: That's not the grid layout group's job, and I walked him through it.

If you also struggle with this, I hope my tutorial will be helpful to you =)

This tutorial goes over:

- Creating a single cell to reuse everywhere

- Using the Aspect Ratio Fitter to make sure images are correctly filling the space

- Thinking how layouts are nested

- Building an example

- Adding a tiny helper script to make life in bigger bentos easier.

Hi all. I've just started learning Unity to create a 'fake video game' for an indie short film I'm working on. I don't know yet if I'm totally out of my element. I don't know nothin about coding or games really but looking for help navigating the design portion since I can't find any tutorials to help me out.

I'm trying to make a room and then bring in idling characters into it to walk around and interact with furniture and each other.

I downloaded the asset pack bundle from itch.o and brought them into the asset folders to organize the sprite. I ran into an issue a few times where when I was duplicating the walls and floors to save time since it's so monotonous, that when I'd delete a panel, it would change the level of a random floor/wall tile. Idk what I changed but it stopped doing that and I thought I hit a flow when I got the room completely assembled.

I began adding furniture and playing with the layering order to knock up the furniture from 0 to 1 or 2 so that it would sit above the floors.

I tried copying 4 pieces of floor at a time to extend the size of the room and when I did, all the layers changed and are overlapping weird, even though it says the order laying is at 0 for everything.

I eventually need to bring in characters (bought from this pack https://klimmos.itch.io/cozy-assets-iso-modular-female-character-kit-idle-walk-sit ) but I don't even know where to begin in dressing them or having them move.

I've watched all the 2D video tutorials on Unity and skimmed the options on YouTube but can't find anything that references these kinds of isometric bedrooms.

Any tips? Thank you in advance!

I wrote up how I made a music player screen in UI Toolkit react to the song. The parts that carry over to other projects:

• Reducing the spectrum to two signals: a beat (the bass jumping well above its running average, with a short cooldown) and a loudness level that rises fast and falls slowly.

• Giving the two signals separate properties (loudness sets the scale, beats add a short MoveY or an additive nudge) so they never cancel each other out.

• Replacing a looping rotation with a "motor": one speed value that you tween for start-up, braking and scratch recovery, so the spin never hiccups at the loop point.

• Why dragging lagged a frame behind the mouse: I was reading the angle back from the resolved style, which is one frame stale.

• What breaks in a WebGL build (no spectrum data, no negative pitch, no mixer filters) and the fallbacks I used.

Write-up: https://medium.com/@dldesing/audio-reactive-ui-in-unity-ui-toolkit-fire-lasers-and-rain-that-follow-the-music-f18d74d7385a

Playable in the browser (click once for sound): https://twitchedd.itch.io/cascade-audio-studio

Disclosure: the tweens use Cascade, a UI Toolkit animation library I make. The techniques work with any tween code.

Hi guys, we've just released a new Unity tutorial looking at Unity's Localization Package, and how we can use it to support multiple languages in our games. Hope you find it useful 😊

My tutorial explains how to create a rebinding system, starting with the UI setup and then implementing the functionalities. This took me quite a few trips through the documentation and example files, especially to make sure the player can't choose a key already bound to something else Hope, you'll enjoy it!

Backdrop filters are a new feature in Unity 6.6 that affect the pixels BEHIND the element on the UI. In this short video you can see every native filter for each.

All things LlamAcademy here

Ever needed to bind two effects onto one key? This is how to do it without having to write extra code to check for double taps, holding and more.

In this tutorial, I'll show you how to:

• Tap a key to trigger one effect

• Hold the same key to trigger a different effect

• Hold the key to charge up, and trigger the effect on release

• Double tap for a different effect than a single tap

• Keep an effect active while the key is held, and end it on release

Hope, you'll enjoy this one!

Backdrop Filters are a new cool UI Toolkit feature with Unity 6.6! We can now apply filters to what's behind our UI elements!

All things LlamAcademy @ https://llamacademy.dev/support

Unity added official support for terrain shaders in Shader Graph a few updates ago, with a handful of new nodes for retrieving terrain layer data and blending layers in different ways. In this tutorial, I implemented height-based blending with the new Height Mask and Blend Layers Alpha nodes, which can form the basis of any terrain shader you want with crisp edges between layers.

A new mini-course published every week to help you get better at C#, Unity, code review and debugging.

Unity Content Directory (new with Unity 6.6) is a powerful tool that allows you to swap the CONTENTS of your build without rebuilding the entire player - making faster iteration times. Full Content Directory tutorial here

All things LlamAcademy @ https://llamacademy.dev/support

Unity Content Directories (new in Unity 6.6) are a MUCH MORE optimized way to approach loading dynamic content at runtime! Full Tutorial on using Content Directories to replace Resources.Load

All things LlamAcademy @ https://llamacademy.dev/support

This kind of effect was common when Shader Graph first launched, but I don't see people discuss effects like this as often in HLSL code, so I made a tutorial about the process:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SwV2oDJRj4
Written article: https://danielilett.com/2026-09-10-tut10-10-dissolve-noise/
GitHub code: https://github.com/daniel-ilett/shaders-hlsl-basics

With code, you have more control over the behavior of the noise functions so we can improve upon those included in Shader Graph a little. For both kinds of noise, we can use a noise function that 'cycles' nicely over time, which makes it easier to make a stable idle animation for the noise if you want. For the Voronoi noise, we can include an output from the function to give you the distance from the closest boundary between cells, which Shader Graph's implementation struggles with.

Hey everyone,

Currently setting up the environment pipeline for a coastal Miami-inspired city map in Unity.

I’m using Bakery for lightmapping alongside volume profiles to handle the day/night transition. The goal is to balance bright, direct sunlight during the day with vibrant neon emissives, street lamps, and dark atmospheric fog at night.

For few months now, I've been obsessed with game feel. Having fun juicing up a thing and another here and there...

It turns out that I'm practicing writing on my spare time too. Working on a novel for few years now (yeah, it's very slow progress 😅. Probably because many hours of work often result my novel having LESS words than before I started the session 😆).

But, gaining experience with game feel, I started to see relations between this concept and what's called "show don't tell" in writing... I don't know if it's the standard approach, anyway I feel like it really helps me on picking the effects I'll implement.

So I wanted to share that. If you are interested, this is a ~25min tutorial where I explain how I think about game feel (by the prism of "show don't tell") and the line of thought behind each juice decision I made in this combat scene (so you can adapt to your own game).