Many games use loading screens as an opportunity to give hints on how to play the game well or build the lore of the game.
For example, a role-playing game might have a large outdoor area for the player to explore, but once they enter a cave or a building, a loading screen can switch from the outdoor scene to the interior scene. In other instances, a game might be so large that different scenes are required to break up the game. This is helpful because it allows the game to start extremely rapidly, because the assets for a main menu scene can be loaded almost instantaneously.
When the player chooses to start the game, the “game scene” is loaded. In some instances, the game itself might take place in a single scene, but a secondary “main menu scene” can be used to allow the player to configure options and choose when to start the game. There are many ways to load assets into a game, but in Unity, one of the most common techniques is to change from one scene to another. For this reason, sometimes games need to show a screen to the player that indicates the game needs some time to catch up to the action. Unfortunately, computers have limited memory capacity and there’s also a limit to how fast data can be loaded and unloaded not everything can be read from the hard drive or streamed from the web in real-time. This is a necessary step because games generally render graphics at 60 frames per second or higher, and the memory on the motherboard and graphics card provides much faster access to the data that’s necessary to render each frame and run the logic of the game. Loading screens are used when moving models, textures, sounds, and other game assets from a larger storage medium (such as a hard disk drive, optical drive, or the web) into memory on either the motherboard (RAM) or the graphics card (video memory). In this post, you’ll learn how to create a loading screen with flashing “Loading…” text that looks like this. A loading bar or a spinning icon will pop up, and you’ll have to wait for a few moments. Often, you’ll see a loading screen at the start of a game, or when entering a new area of the game. At some point or another, every game developer has to create a loading screen.