GentlyUI is a lightweight, pattern-based UI framework designed specifically for Unity projects with complex user interfaces. Built with a declarative approach, it empowers developers to define UI layouts and behaviors clearly and intuitively—making it easier for the entire team to contribute to UI implementation without getting bogged down in intricate code details, assembling interfaces from prefabs, or worse: manually building them element by element.
I began developing GentlyUI during the pre-production phase of Endzone 2, drawing on valuable lessons learned from working on Endzone – A World Apart. The framework was crafted to address the challenges faced in that project and to provide a flexible, scalable solution for future UI development needs.
One of GentlyUI’s core strengths lies in its use of object pooling. This technique not only boosts performance by efficiently managing UI elements, but also ensures that existing UI components and layouts are reused whenever possible, rather than constantly creating new ones. Combined with its pattern-based structure, this approach naturally leads to clean, consistent, and easy-to-understand interfaces for players—massively improving the overall user experience.
