July 7, 2016

Unity + Asset Store = WIN

Recently I've had the chance to work on a cool project as a freelancing designer. We used a bunch of different tools - some in-house and some from Unity's asset store. I knew the power of asset store beforehand, but now it became even more clear.

There are TONS of ready-made tools, helpers, assets, effects, models and whatnot on the asset store for extremely cheap prices. I'll list my favorites here. I'm sure some of these will dramatically effect the development times of yours, too, if you give them a chance.

Dreamteck Splines (26.80€)
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/61926

An insanely designer-friendly tool for creating anything with splines, including extruding meshes, placing objects, animating, etc. Almost any project can take some advantage of it.


Quickbrush (13.40€)
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/15237

Designer- and artist-friendly tool to place objects on meshes with lots of customizability. An absolute must-have if you need to, for example, decorate your levels with prefabs etc.


I2 Localization (40.20€) 
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/14884

I was worried that when ultimately I need to start localizing my games, I'd have trouble developing the tools for it. With a quick browse in asset store, I found this gem. Extremely easy and developer-friendly system with a complete localization implementation using either Google Sheets or local files.


Realistic Car Controller (44.67€)
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/16296

For games that have cars, obviously. Again very designer-friendly implementation with lots of customizability. Includes not only the car behaviour, but also implementation for dynamic lights, audio, damage system, etc.


EXAMPLE TIME!


To give you an idea on just how powerful Unity can be especially when utilizing asset store, here's a game I made. It took about 3 hours from start to finish. It's not a shippable game obviously, but it has a lot of features that would take months to do from scratch if you wouldn't utilize the asset store.

In this game I used Dreamteck Splines, Realistic Car Controller, Quickbrush, and all the visual assets were bought, or downloaded for free, from the asset store. The visual assets I used cost about $3 to be precise.

The game required programming only to create the UI functionality and the finish line. Everything else was out-of-the-box ready-made Unity asset store magic.

Controls are WASD. It's an executable in a zip-file. Have fun!
http://parttimemonkey.com/private/AssetStoreRules.zip


10 comments:

  1. How important is localization for small indie games? Is an english-only game a barrier for entry to some markets or is it more about widening the possible audience?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Short answer: not important.

      I thought Space Band would get good visibility on the App Store by localizing it, as it had already gained some interest from Apple. I localized it in EFIGS, RU, br-PT, TR and FI, expecting to see visibility in at least those countries. However, for some reason, that update got even less visibility than the others before.

      So at least to me it seems that it makes no sense for a small indie to waste their money on localization.

      Delete
  2. Couldn't do without assetstore and it has also taught a lot of tricks and approaches to problems. Unity plugins for peripherals are almost a standard stuff also so it's easy to start working with different devices.

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  3. "It's not a shippable game obviously".

    Yet still almost as shippable as "Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing" was. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hehe. Maybe the day I lose all hope, I just start shipping shitty games one a day.

      Delete
  4. It is pleasure to share about your awesome release!pre owned games india

    ReplyDelete
  5. Your blog provided us with valuable information to work with. Thanks a lot for sharing.

    asset store

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