I've gotten started on adding UI elements to the Swarm game. I first created a player healthbar that was fixed on the screen with a few simple public variables for options of resizing in scale of the provided healthbar sprite image, and options to be aligned to any side of the view. But after this was conpleted, we canned player health in favor of a unified health of the swarm. So I opened the fixed healthbar up to be able to be applied to any entity since the game moved in favor of a boss-fighting game instead of a side-scrolling, battle, adventure. I didn't like this much, because it took up too much real estate for one entity. So I moved in favor of a floating healthbar that follows the entity to which its attached. The healthbar can be resized, and offset in +/- X and Y directions. the designer can also determine how long the healthbar will show upon a health change. If the health goes up or down, the healthbar will appear for whatever duration is set. Otherwise, it is not shown. I would also like to open this up such that the designer can select the color indicators on the healthbar as well.
After this, since the player's health is essentially the sum of the swarm and it's not totally easy to see how many swarm units are flying about, I added a swarm counter. The swarm counter uses GUIText to set up the basics (i.e. Font color, font size, position, base string, etc.) of the text. Then my script allows them to set the colors that indicate a positive and negative change and how long to show that change.
The Turtle Boss has his 5 appendages which poke out every now and then and those are what take damage. The placeholder way this was done by the team is by having a weak point with some scripts for retracting, taking damage, and protruding. This game object had a stock box overlay that would turn red upon damage. This was butt ugly. So I updated the well-written color-fader script to allow the designer to select the sprite the coloration should affect, if the sprite is not specified, it assumes the sprite that shares the GameObject with the script. Now, when a Turtle appendage takes damage it turns red for a set time and fades back to its default color.