Game UIs are evolving — not just in aesthetics, but in how they’re built. In 2025, the best studios aren’t just designing beautiful interfaces — they’re streamlining how designs go from Figma to engine without friction, frustration, or duplicated work.
Whether you’re working in Unity, Unreal, or WebGL, your UI workflow needs to support:
- Rapid prototyping
- Live developer/designer handoff
- Pixel precision + responsive layout
- Style consistency across platforms
Here’s how teams are modernizing their UI design pipelines — and the tools you should be using.
🎨 Why Figma Still Leads in 2025
Figma remains the #1 choice for UI prototyping in games because:
- It’s cloud-based (perfect for remote teams)
- It supports developer specs and redlines
- It has a huge plugin ecosystem for gaming
💡 Use Figma’s Variants and Auto Layout to structure menus like inventory, settings, and HUDs — then connect flows via Prototyping mode for UX previews.
🔄 Plugins to Export Figma Designs to Unity & Unreal
1. Figma to Unity (F2U)
Exports Figma frames into .PNG + metadata for Unity layout. Supports anchors, 9-slice scaling, and Font-to-TextMeshPro translation.
2. F2U Pro (Paid)
Preserves layer order, anchors, padding, and prefab nesting. Supports live sync from Figma to Unity prefab folders.
3. Figma2Unreal (Open Source)
Basic support for exporting menu wireframes into UMG canvas formats.
🛠 Supporting Tools for UI Prototyping & Dev
- Zeplin: Great for redline + design token export
- LottieFiles: For in-game UI animations
- Overlay: Design-to-dev with live engine previews
Use tools like Layout Grid Debuggers and Unity’s new UI Toolkit for full responsive scaling across mobile/tablet/console.
📈 How the Best Teams Work
Case Study: 5-Person Indie Game UI Pipeline
- Designer builds UI in Figma (HUD, menus, onboarding)
- Exports via F2U plugin to Unity prefab structure
- Dev connects prefabs to UI controllers and events
- Iteration happens in Figma, synced to engine weekly
- Playtests via Unity UI Toolkit and Shader Graph variants
📬 Final Thoughts
In 2025, your UI pipeline isn’t just about polish — it’s about efficiency and collaboration. The less time your team spends replicating layouts and button placements, the more time they can spend perfecting UX, animation, and performance.
With the right plugins and workflow, your UI doesn’t just look good — it builds itself into your game world with minimal friction.