How to Create A Loading Scene in Unity

Unity makes it simpler than you might think

Sample loading scene

Load screens have always been kind of an enigma to me. Like what is actually going on under the hood. Are there a bunch of Gremlins running around dropping game assets into place? Well it turns out that, in Unity at least, the answer is much more straight forward.

First we need to create a new scene in Unity, much like a main menu this scene is all UI elements on the canvas. The load bar which used to seem like some kind of magic to me is actually just a really simple UI trick.

In the load scene above there are 3 Images on the canvas. The background which is most of what you see. The yellow load progress bar and the red splatter overlay on top of the yellow.

Inspector properties

Only the yellow bar is animated, using the Image controls inside the inspector. We make four (4) changes to the default image. Image type is changed to filled, fill method is set to horizontal, fill origin is set to left and we adjust the fill amount in code.

Load level code

That’s all there is to it. We start a coroutine to load the level and then load the level using an AsyncOperation. This loads the level in the background while our current scene runs, if the scene isn’t loaded the progress bar updates every frame to the current state of the progress using a float value 0 to 1.

Now my computer is so powerful that it loads the scene before the load screen can finish processing, so if you want your load scenes to be seen by players you may have to artificially delay them. That being said I am of the opinion the fewer load screens the better.