Edvin's Nested Tooltips

Unity Asset to easily add nested tooltips based on a keyword system

The game in play

Screenshot of a tooltip

Edvin's Nested Tooltips is exactly what it sounds like, it's a Unity Asset that helps easily adds layered tooltips. Perfect for strategy games, rpg's or just any game with many mechanics and subsystems. The Unity Asset can be found here:

Screenshot of nested tooltips in the example scene

Features:

  • Lightweight, easy to use, tooltip system.
  • Expandable keywords system for tooltips in tooltips
  • Icons in tooltips using TMPro Sprite sheets.
  • Scriptable Objects for keywords, set any info you want for any of them
  • Own canvas layer, tooltips will easily appear above all other ui (canvas layer 200 by default) and won't interfere with other UI
  • Settings for everything you can think; tooltip appear time, text color, formatting, titles, keyword types
  • Only instantiating at game start, no unnecessary instantiating and deleting of objects during runtime

Development Process

As a fan of complicated strategy game, tooltips and good UI design have been important practice for me for a long time. Even in the first strategy game I made in Unity, City State, I implemented simple tooltips for the resource types.
But what I really wanted was tooltips like those found in modern paradox games, starting with Crusader Kings 3. These are really useful for explaining complex game mechanics and showing how they connect to each other. During the developed of Wizards Legacy, I made the first version of layered tooltips, though that version was far more buggy than this one. When I worked on High Frontier as part of my internship with ION Game Design I implemented a better version in the game. The tooltip system I implemented there works but it still had some limitations, with keywords not being able to be part of other keywords. Still I really liked the system and wanted to make a standalone version that I could use in future projects. I made a standalone project and fixed issues like keywords not be able to contain part of other keywords and the tooltips going by the edge of the screen. During the development I realized it could be a useful tool for others, and spent time polishing it and making it as easy to use possible.