View the entire tutorial on What Up Games.

Introduction

There are many different styles of inventory systems and in this tutorial series you will learn how to create a grid-based system that requires the player to sort items by size to carry as many as possible. This part of the series builds on the design from part 1 by instantiating a visual to represent items held and adding the ability to organize them. On the surface, this logic seems simple – just drag/drop. However, scenarios that prevent an item from being placed make the logic more complicated.

This tutorial is a continuation of the grid inventory system that was started in Part 1, Design the Grid Based Inventory System.

Learning Outcomes

This tutorial will cover the basics of interacting with UI Toolkit from C# and populating it with data from a ScriptableObject. By the end, you will know how to:

• Define and create scriptable object assets to represent items in an inventory
• Create a Visual Element and set various properties via C#
• Hook up mouse/pointer click and move events to implement drag/drop behavior
• Check for overlapping Visual Elements
• Set a Visual Elements position at runtime based on the mouse

Prerequisites

• You should have Unity 2021.1.12f1 or later to follow along with this tutorial.
• This tutorial assumes you have basic knowledge of Unity and C#.

This tutorial will work with earlier versions of Unity but has a higher chance of having UI Toolkit related bugs and may have different installation requirements. Check out the UI Builder release notes for more information on compatible versions.