The publisher Jettelly is very young, but it is releasing some very interesting titles. They started with books about shading in Unity and Godot, and little by little they have been expanding the range of topics. The wait until they finally released this book felt long. Although they offer the option to buy it in advance at a discount while the chapters are being completed, I don’t have enough patience to read books in fragments. That’s why, even if I lose the discount, I prefer to wait until they are finished. In this case, I was really looking forward to it because in my projects I have found myself countless times needing to develop custom inspectors to make editing my components easier. Over time, I’ve learned how to do this, but Unity’s documentation is not the clearest in the world on the subject, and the technological shift to UI Toolkit has not helped to clarify things. Even so, I still had many doubts about whether I was doing things the right way and, in any case, about the reasons why they had to be done that way.
Fortunately, this book has cleared up many of those doubts. It follows an incremental structure, starting with the simplest editor customizations—Property Drawers and Decorator Drawers—and then gradually increasing in complexity while building on the previous concepts. The process is so gradual and clear that it’s easy to understand the new concepts being introduced. It’s true that I already had some prior knowledge from my earlier tinkering with UI Toolkit, but that actually helped me see that the author hasn’t taken shortcuts; instead, he explains everything from the beginning without skipping anything.
In the end, the book covers the following topics:
- Property Drawers and Decorator Drawers
- Attribute Drawers
- Custom inspectors
- Custom editors
- Interface design with UI Builder
- Creating interfaces to edit ScriptableObjects
The examples presented are very simple, with very limited functionality, but they are more than sufficient to focus on learning how to use Unity’s UI Toolkit without getting distracted by other matters. The code used is also clear and well structured.
It’s also worth appreciating that the book’s layout is pleasant to look at and makes the text easy to read. I don’t know what the printed version is like, because I read it digitally, but at least in this version the illustrations are in color, which is very helpful for distinguishing the details of the interfaces being explained.
In the end, this book has been so enlightening that I want to use it to revisit the custom editors I had already created. I’m sure I’ll be able to simplify them with what I’ve learned here. On the other hand, it has helped me overcome my fear of creating custom interfaces—a task I used to undertake only when necessity left me no alternative, but one that I will undoubtedly approach with much greater peace of mind in the future.
The publisher promises that a second volume of the book will be released. I hope that’s the case, and soon.
