The user interface of a game is a huge part of it’s success as it is quite literally the most direct connection the player has to the game. Today we are doing a rundown of the various game user interface technologies that exist, with a focus on the 3 most popular game engines, Unreal Engine, Unity and Godot.
Game User Interface Technologies
Scaleform was once the industry standard for game UI development, having been used in literally thousands of commercial games. It enabled game developers to create games using tools like Adobe Flash/Animate. Scaleform is no longer supported and the Flash runtime no longer exists.
Unreal Engine
Unreal Engine has several different layers/levels of UI functionality out of the box, from low level APIs to high level tools. In order (low level to high) their technologies include:
- Slate UI Framework
- UMG – Unreal Motion Graphics
- Common UI Framework
- UI Frameworks and Libraries on Fab
Unity
Similar to Unreal Engine, Unity have several different UI technologies built at different levels of abstraction, although they have more recently released UI Toolkit as the intended successor to most of their technologies. These techs include:
Godot
Out of the box Godot has an incredibly robust UI toolkit, which is part of why Godot has been used to create so many non-game applications. Key links for Godot include:
There are also several 3rd party game engine focused UI technologies available these include.
Dear IMGUI
This is an open source immediate mode user interface toolkit. It’s not really meant for games, more for game creation tool development. A role where it is very popular. (Learn More)
NOESIS GUI
This is a cross game engine commercial game UI development environment, built of both the Noesis Runtime (learn more) and the newer Noesis Studio (learn more). This technology is built on top of XAML and has been used to power AAA titles like Baldur’s Gate 3.
Gameface by Coherent Labs
Similar to Noesis, Gameface is another commercial cross game engine game user interface development middleware solution. The big difference here is Gameface uses HTML, JavaScript and CSS for UI development. It has been used for games such as Civilizations 7 and World of Tanks 2.0.
Rive For Games
Rive started life as a vector graphics animation application, but have since released a game development focused runtime. Currently only supporting Unreal Engine and custom C++ implementations, Unity and Defold runtimes are also in the works.
Fairy GUI
Fairy GUI is another game user interface middleware solution supporting a number of game engines (10+). It is more popular in Asian markets and honestly I have zero experience with this technology.
You can learn more about all of these game user interface (GUI or UI) middleware and first party solutions in the video below. Let me know in the video comments or on the GameFromScratch Discord server if I missed one.