Best practice for designing the UI for different platforms

MAC

Hi,

what would be the best way for designing especially the UI for different platforms? I want our game to run on desktop computers and mobile devices. By now I designed the UI (basically the default UI that comes with the AC 3d demo) for desktop only and found that it's quite useless on my smartphone. Now I changed everything (size of the inventory (items), dialogue options, icons and menus to be nicely usable on my smartphone, but on a desktop system it is overwhelming big. What's the right way to keep it good an all devices. I started to write down all values for the different platforms to change them before building the game, but I think that's not the right way. Should I create a dedicated set of managers for each platform and only switch those managers before build? Is that possible? How do you do it?

ChrisIceBox

This is less of an AC topic and more a general Unity one.  Unity's UI system has many options related to how a UI scales across different resolutions, you should first of all switch to Unity UI prefabs.

Rather than having separate Managers for each platform, if you did need a variety in what Menus are available, just create them all in the same Menu Manager, and then lock/unlock them as needed before building.

MAC

I will take a look at Unity UI, but I think it's not just a matter of scaling alone. For example I adjusted the number of inventory items to 14 for desktop and 8 for mobile and I don't know how this would work by just switching to Unity UI.

Another thing is that seperate Managers would also give me the opportunity to change the controls for platforms, for example using Drag&Drop functionality on mobile devices. Using the inventory at the moment is a bit cheesy. From the technical side it would be possible to use seperate Managers for the platforms or are there limitations I didn't think off yet?

ChrisIceBox

The main thing is that you keep the same Inventory, Actions, Cursor and Variable Managers, to keep gameplay breakages to a minimum.  You can use separate Settings Manager if you need to, but I would instead recommend you write a script that dynamically changes the few settings that you need to when the game begins.

Right-clicking any field's label in the Settings Manager allows you to copy the API reference to it into the text-buffer, making it easy to change via script.