Animated titles, menus, HUD text and score counters

The title screen needs a logo word that looks like it belongs on a poster. The pause menu wants a short entrance for each item. The HUD shows an objective, a context prompt, a combo counter and a score that changes forty times a minute. Usually that means a different script or prefab for each, and a HUD that keeps animating labels nobody is looking at.

Text Studio treats all of them as text with three questions: what does it look like, how does it arrive, and how does it react when it changes. The answers are tags, looks and settings on the same component, on TextMeshPro, UI Toolkit or legacy UI Text.

Give titles a look

A title is mostly appearance. Text Studio ships 60+ ready-made looks, from Chrome Title, Cinematic Gold and Neon Cyan to Comic Impact, Arcade Champion and Toxic Warning, built from layered fills, strokes, glows, shadows, bevels and faux depth. Pick one in the Text Gallery or with Browse in the Appearance section, which opens the Style Browser with filters, Favorites and Recent, and preview it in the Inspector before applying it.

One of the ready-made looks, rendered by Text Studio.

Looks can also apply to a phrase rather than the whole text. Define a named style and wrap the words: <$warning>Low health</$warning>. Tint and opacity adjust one use of it, so a warning can flash brighter without a second style. The persistent 2D text chapter covers building your own looks layer by layer, and the outline and glow guide goes deeper on the classic treatments.

Give it an entrance, then let it rest

Every Text Studio text has three phases: Reveal when it appears, Active while it is on screen, and Hide when it leaves. For interface text, the rule of thumb is a short, confident Reveal, a still Active phase, and a quick Hide:

• Chapter cards and level titles: reveal by word with Pop, Elastic or Fade, hold, then hide with the matching effect. Center-Out sequencing works well for single words.
• Menu items: stagger a small Slide or Fade per line so the menu reads top to bottom.
• Objectives and prompts: replace the text in place; changed glyphs animate while the rest stays put.
• Credits and long logs: the Auto Scroll Follower keeps continuous text moving, and TMP Page overflow handles codex pages.

Keeping the Active phase still is not only a style choice. Since Text Studio 1.3, settled text skips its per-frame updates until its source or appearance changes, and large groups of parked Canvas labels share scale checks. A HUD that rests costs very little; a HUD where every label wiggles forever does not.

Make changes readable: scores and counters

Numbers change constantly, and re-animating the whole score on every point is noisy. The Numeric Value text-change scope matches the formatted number by decimal place: digits that did not change keep their position, only the changed digits run their effect, and multiple-number text falls back to the ordinary change detection.

Three settings make counters feel right:

1. Set the text-change scope to NumericValue, and NumericDecimalSeparator to your formatter’s decimal separator.
2. Set TextChangeLayoutDuration, for example 0.18 seconds, so retained digits slide when the number grows from 999 to 1,000. Rapid updates continue from the current positions instead of restarting.
3. Use SetTextDeferred when a value may change several times before the next visual update; the changes collapse into one.

A Counter Outgoing reaction on a changing score digit.

For a little extra punch, the Counter Outgoing reaction recipe lets the old digit leave while the new one arrives. Numeric Value text, such as scores and countdowns, prepares its runtime digits automatically, so styled counters do not need project-wide digit preparation. No Motion and instant updates settle immediately, which matters for players who turn motion off.

Combo words, pickups and level-ups

Short-lived gameplay text, like “LEVEL UP!”, “+420” or “COMBO x12”, belongs on an emitter rather than in the HUD layout. GameObject > Text Studio > Temporary Text > Emitter creates one with a default preset and a reusable host, and the ready-made Damage, Critical, Heal, Status, Combo and Score presets cover the common cases. Pooling, stacking, merging and target following live on the emitter, so the HUD code only calls it. The damage numbers guide explains the whole setup.

Hover, focus and replay in menus

Menus feel alive when an item reacts to the pointer. In UI Toolkit, the Recipes window (Tools > Text Studio > Recipes) has ready-to-copy snippets for hover restarts and focus reveals on ordinary Labels, plus complete UXML and code-created examples. For TextMeshPro buttons, call RestartEffects() on the text from your own pointer or selection events. The UI Toolkit guide covers bindings and UI Builder.

The Responsive HUD example

The Responsive HUD scene in the examples puts all of this together: a callsign input field, supplies, combos, waypoints, a context prompt and priority warnings. Its notification queue merges pickups and resumes ordinary notices after a warning, the score uses Numeric Value with retained-glyph layout interpolation, and prepared icons stay attached when prompt text is replaced. A restartable round countdown sits next to it in the effect recipes. Open it from Tools > Text Studio > Examples; it is one of 30+ example scenes.

The Common Game Scenarios chapter has the HUD recipe in short form: change values with SetTextDeferred, keep the default state still, use a brief effect on change, and isolate units or warning thresholds with authored ranges instead of rebuilding markup every frame.

Limits worth knowing

• Appearance looks render on TextMeshPro, in Canvas and world space, and on UniText. UI Toolkit labels get effects, the typewriter and, on Unity 6.2 or newer, per-glyph color and placement.
• A look’s prepared glyphs cover the characters it was prepared for. If a title changes language or shows player names, add the characters under Runtime Preparation so the look renders them too.
• Notification queues, combo timers and score logic stay in your game code. Text Studio owns how the text looks and moves, not what it says.