As you will remember from Chapter 3, Designing the Game, we determined that we would have six on-screen components: health, lives, score, cherries, cucumbers, and Cucumber Beetles. That design will now be modified to include a mini-map in the lower-right-hand corner of the screen:

Now that there will be seven components to our HUD, let's review each of them, organized by region:

• Top-left:
  • Player Health: This will consist of a text label indicating Health and a health meter tied to the Cucumber Man's health.
  • Lives: We will have a visual indication of the Cucumber Man's remaining lives. The player will start with three lives.
• Top-right:
  • Score: We will add a text label indicating the score and then have the player's actual score updated here.
  • Cherries: The number of cherries the Cucumber Man has will be updated and displayed here.
• Bottom-right:
  • Mini-Map: This will be a mini-map that shows an overview of the game map with indicators of where the Cucumber Beetles are.
• Bottom-left:
  • Cucumbers: We will include a text label, along with the number of cucumbers left in the game.
  • Cucumber Beetles: This final area of the HUD will feature a text label and the number of Cucumber Beetles left in the game.

Now that we have a clear design for our HUD, we are ready to create it. Before you move on to the next section, you should open your Unity game project. Alternatively, you can download the Starting-Chapter-09 Unity project available from the publisher's companion site.