Push

The following video tutorial shows you how to create a 9-Slice panel from scratch. I’ll be using Lua and Love2D, but the same technique could be applied to just about any language or framework.

For those of you who don’t like using existing libraries or just simply want to know how it’s done, this should be useful. It’s also good to know how these things are made because it’s the basis of creating a lot of other UI elements. Sometimes a hand-made solution works better than something in a library or framework.

There’s a good chance that you’ll make a game and won’t even know what screen size your player will have. This can make it difficult to design things like user interfaces, sprite sizes, etc. There are many ways to deal with this problem, but I think the simplest thing is to draw to a render texture at a fixed size and have that scale automatically to fit any screen.

I think the Push library is great for handling that, and it’s excellent for making games with pixel art as well. The video below is quick guide to setting it up.