A live demo in front of the room

CONTEXT

Proving the migration path live, not just describing it

Sports Interactive was moving Football Manager, one of the most UI-dense games in the industry, onto Unity and UI Toolkit. Unity wanted to show that migration working rather than only describe it, so the Unite session was built around a live demo instead of slides.

I co-presented with UI Toolkit software developer Camil Bouzidi, telling Sports Interactive's side of the move. My part was the demo itself: building a Player Card component in UI Builder on stage and wiring it to live game data with runtime data binding, using no-code and low-code authoring only.

WHAT I DEMOED

The build followed the path a real team migrating onto UI Toolkit would actually take: inline styling first, then reusable USS selectors, USS variables and style extraction. Every workflow on screen, tooltips, the binding context menu, non-attribute property binding, selector-scoped filtering, was something I had personally designed on the UI Builder side elsewhere in this work.

The demo was not a scripted recording. It was the authoring surface, live, under the time pressure of a stage rather than a seated usability session.

OUTCOME

UI Toolkit promoted the session as one of Unity's two official UI Toolkit talks at Unite 2024. Afterward I published the demo project, the Player Card's UXML at each build stage, for the community on Unity Discussions, so anyone could open the same file and follow the same path rather than take the talk's word for it.

This talk is the public face of the UI Builder design work described elsewhere on this site: the same tooltips, binding affordances and style workflows, demoed in front of the people who use them.