The UI health bar
In the previous section, we introduced the first danger and hazard to the game; namely, a Kill Zone that can damage and potentially kill the player. As a result, their health has the potential to reduce from its starting state. It's therefore useful both to us as developers and gamers to visualize the health status. For this reason, let's focus on rendering player health to the screen as a UI health bar. This configuration of objects will also be made as a prefab, allowing reuse across multiple scenes This will prove a highly useful feature. Figure 6.9 offers a glimpse of the future, displaying the result of our work to come:
Figure 6.9: Preparing to create player health
To get started, create a new GUI Canvas in the scene (any scene) by choosing GameObject | UI | Canvas from the application menu. Selecting this will automatically create an EventSystem object in the scene, if one does not exist already. This object is essential for proper use of the UI system. If you accidentally...
