Best Tools for Making/Animating UI?

[MouseLiver]

Hello! Firstly, I apologize if this is in the wrong section. There aren't a ton of categories in which to make posts.

I'm looking to create the UI for my mobile dating sim. I want the buttons to have flashy animations when they're pressed. For example, when I dialogue button is tapped, I want something like a white outline to draw itself around the button quickly, then flash. Basically, things that will make the player addicted to hitting the buttons. Lots of nice sounds and satisfying animations. Since a dating sim doesn't have very engaging gameplay by its design, I want to make sure that what the player can do feels as good as possible.

I'm looking for programs that I can learn quickly that will help me quickly make high quality (not pixel art style) buttons, and also an animation software that I can quickly and easily produce animations with. I don't mind paying a little bit of money, but my budget would be around 25 dollars per program, although that's flexible if there's something that will really work phenomenally. Any other tips and tricks for animating or making UI would also be appreciated! Thank you!

 

[MouseLiver]

bump

 

[Yal]

What I'd do is to make a button parent object that every button inherits from (and same for other UI elements, but I guess buttons will be the main interactible element?) which handles drawing itself, destroying itself if its parent dialogue box is gone, and has a full state machine for doing things.

• When clicked, temporarily enter an "effect state" where it jiggles, creates hearts, shakes and stuff. This state could be set in a variable so that some buttons can have different effects.
• When created, it doesn't actually start right at its intended position - it starts offscreen and smoothly slides into place using an animation curve or path.
• Same thing when destroyed: it smoothly slides offscreen, perhaps falling off with gravity or exploding away depending on how the textbox was destroyed. (E.g. if you selected a choice that really pissed off your date, the textbox would explode with a record scratch noise and all buttons fall down haphazardly like debris)
• Things like the outline flashing could either be a state (which lets you spawn particle effects, or run special-case code in the Draw event) or a separate effect object. There's always more than one way to do things in programming!