As always, RivelloMultimediaConsulting.com/unity/ will be the central location for deep articles and tutorials, Facebook.com/RivelloMultimediaConsulting (like us!) will engage the growing RMC+Unity community, and for the latest opinions and cool links follow me at Twitter.com/srivello.

Unity3D is a powerful suite of tools (Project IDE, Code IDE, run-time) for game development. The Unity IDE is great for integrating your assets and code, setting up your scenes visually, and tweaking parameters through the powerful Inspector window. While Unity ships with a very capable code editor, MonoDevelop, serious developers prefer more powerful tools.

Here is a list of the must-have tools for Unity development.

Name: Visual Studio – Code Editor (Various Versions, Free to $499)

Competitor: MonoDevelop (Free), Xamarin Studio (300-1000$ / yr)

Details: Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It includes a code editor supporting IntelliSense as well as code refactoring. Built-in languages include Unity’s C# as well as C, C++, and more.

Pros:

• Development Environment – Focus on creating value and accomplishing task quicker with a clean, fast and powerful development environment.
• Semantic Code Analysis – Semantics (references, declarations, etc…) not just syntax are analyzed as you type. This allows for better refactoring.
• VisualSVN – Subversion integration (GIT too)
• Great Navigation – New ways to travel around your code, including peek.
• UML Diagram Built In – Improving architecture through modeling

Showcase Video:

• Visual Studio Features Overview (Video)

Name: ReSharper ($185 for personal, $310 for a whole team)

Details: ReSharper is a renowned productivity tool that makes Microsoft Visual Studio a much better IDE. Thousands of developers worldwide wonder how they’ve ever lived without ReSharper’s code inspections, automated code refactorings, blazing fast navigation, and coding assistance.

Pros:

• Analyze code quality – On-the-fly code quality analysis in C#, VB.NET, XAML, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and XML. ReSharper tells you right away if your code contains errors or can be improved.
• Instantly traverse your entire solution  – Navigation features to instantly traverse your entire solution. You can jump to any file, type, or type member in no time, or navigate from a specific symbol to its usages, base and derived symbols, or implementations.
• Eliminate errors and code smells – Instant fixes to eliminate errors and code smells. Not only does ReSharper warn you when there’s a problem in your code but it provides quick-fixes to solve them automatically.
• Enjoy code editing helpers – Multiple code editing helpers including extended IntelliSense, hundreds of instant code transformations, auto-importing namespaces, rearranging code and displaying documentation.
• Safely change your code base – Automated solution-wide code refactorings to safely change your code base. Whether you need to revitalize legacy code or put your project structure in order, you can lean on ReSharper.
• Comply to coding standards – Code formatting and cleanup functionality is at your disposal to get rid of unused code and ensure compliance to coding standards.
• More features… including generation of common code, extensible templates, internationalization assistance, and unit test runner.

Showcase Video:

• Why Resharper Is Awesome (Video)

Name: UnityVS ($99 for personal, $249 for a whole team)

Details: UnityVS is the missing ‘glue’ between the Unity IDE and the Visual Studio code editor.

Pros:

• Connect Visual Studio’s debugger to Unity to debug your scripts. Put breakpoints, inspect and modify variables and arguments and evaluate complex expressions to fix bugs promptly. Without UnityVS, Visual Studio is just a powerful yet decoupled code editor.
• UnityVS is packed with productivity features: code snippets, wizards, tool windows such as the Unity project explorer. UnityVS sends the Unity console directly to Visual Studio.
• A short list of essential features.

Play Unity and use breakpoints. At the breakpoint you can inspect AND EDIT the live values of any variable. If that doesn’t convince you to purchase UnityVS, you are insane. – Sam Rivello, RMC

Showcase Video:

• UnityVS Complete Demo (Video)

As always, RivelloMultimediaConsulting.com/unity/ will be the central location for deep articles and tutorials, Facebook.com/RivelloMultimediaConsulting (like us!) will engage the growing RMC+Unity community, and for the latest opinions and cool links follow me at Twitter.com/srivello.

Unity Asset Store

Unity3D is a powerful suite of tools (Project IDE, Code IDE, run-time) for game development. A fantastic way to accelerate Unity & C# learning, empower development, and even make some money using the Unity Asset Store.

• 1. In my previous article “Introduction To the Asset Store” we see a complete Intro to the Unity Asset Store including how you can Fund your Indie Game Development by creating assets. Now let’s hear from some key developers who have published successful content.
• 2. In my second article Unity Asset Store Case Studies, several veterans discuss their success with the store.
• 3. Now, below is the list of the Asset Store Packages created by us at RMC. Enjoy!

ASSET STORE PACKAGES

As always, RivelloMultimediaConsulting.com/unity/ will be the central location for deep articles and tutorials, Facebook.com/RivelloMultimediaConsulting (like us!) will engage the growing RMC+Unity community, and for the latest opinions and cool links follow me at Twitter.com/srivello.

Unity3D is a powerful suite of tools (Project IDE, Code IDE, run-time) for game development. A fantastic way to accelerate Unity & C# learning, empower development, and even make some money using the Unity Asset Store.

In my previous article “Introduction To the Asset Store” we see a complete Intro to the Unity Asset Store including how you can Fund your Indie Game Development by creating assets. Now let’s hear from some key developers who have published successful content.

You can checkout all of the AssetStore packages we at RMC have created and then explore the case studies below from 3rd-party developers.

Case Studies

Name: Android Game Examples (Various)

Category: Complete Projects/Templates

Publisher: Lemo Dev (Denmark)

With 4 years experience in Unity, the team at Lumo Dev first created game examples in c#. Due to demand the product is also available in Java. Lumo found that new developers may not be sure where to start when planning a complete game, so their game templates help accelerate the learning process. The team confides that they too learn greatly from others’ work too.

Throw your product out there! Don’t wait until you created the best product before getting it out. Later, you can always go back and redo stuff, but the important thing is to get experience. – Lumo Dev Team

Name: Camera Path Animator / BuildR

Category: Editor Extensions/Animation

Publisher: Jasper Stocker (Hong Kong)

Jasper Stocker’s most popular product is Camera Path, but since its success he shifted focus. He now specializes in creating procedurally generated content. He has 5-6 years of experience so far with Unity.

I offer tools in a single (programming) language so I didn’t have to maintain two codebases. C# is dominant. I use every time. It’s a bit of a no brainer.

Q: Advice for Unity Game Developers?
A: Learn to extend the editor. It’s pretty simple and you can make some really powerful tools. You can get rid of a lot of boring work by automating it. You can also make things designers might use the make levels more dynamic.

Q: Tips for Asset Store Devs?
A: Work hard to make something robust and test the hell out of it. Try to break it by acting like a bored 5 year old.

Name: Plates Pack Collections (Various)

Category: Textures & Materials/Tiles

Publisher: Fabio Carucci (Italy)

Fabio has 3 years experience with Unity. He creates collections of materials/textures/shaders. He estimates he has spent 100-150 hours learning Unity, doing R&D for his assets, and creating them.

Name: GameDraw FREE / GameDraw PREMIUM

Category: Editor Extensions/Modeling

Publisher: Mixed Dimensions (Jordan / USA)

Mixed Dimensions has 5+ years experience with Unity development for many platforms (Web/IOS/Android/Windows/Mac). Lead, Muhannad confirms that his popular plugins have been downloaded thousands of times and his team continues to update the leading products every month. His tools depend on (and include) existing libraries such as LZMA, ClipperLib, and Poly2Tri (all Managed .NET).

Focus on mobile games and create something that has a need. – Muhannad from Mixed Dimensions.

Many Thanks

I am grateful to these developers for sharing some of their experiences.

As always, RivelloMultimediaConsulting.com/unity/ will be the central location for deep articles and tutorials, Facebook.com/RivelloMultimediaConsulting (like us!) will engage the growing RMC+Unity community, and for the latest opinions and cool links follow me at Twitter.com/srivello.

Unity3D is a powerful suite of tools (Project IDE, Code IDE, run-time) for game development.

A fantastic way to accelerate Unity & C# learning, empower development, and even make some money using the Unity Asset Store.

Asset Store

The Unity IDE offers an Asset Store. If you haven’t yet familiarized yourself with the Asset Store, this is the best time to dive in.  You’ll find nearly everything a game developer could wish for– complete template projects, models of every shape and size, countless textures and materials, an extensive set of code libraries, hours of professional music and sound effects, and a broad selection of editor extensions to bring new functionality to Unity.  Best of all, we’ve gone out of our way to make sure that these offerings are both affordable and covered by a common, easy-to-use license without legal complexities such as royalties.

I think of the store like a (sometimes free) bag of temporary art while I work. More rarely, when tackling a technical challenge I check the store to see if another developer has solved my needs and created a code library. The naming for an asset store ‘item’ doesn’t seem standardized, but when I say 3rd party code-library, package, or plugin I mean the same thing. I mean a collection of code or visual/audio art which augment the IDE itself and/or enable richer development.

Something remarkable, and quite different than the Flash community, is that these packages can actually add functionality to the Unity3D IDE itself. New first-class menus, panels, UI Gizmos, etc… It is truly amazing.

To see our work, You can checkout all of the AssetStore packages we at RMC have created for some examples and then continue reading below to learn an overview about the store.

Unity Technologies, the creators of Unity3D share the revenue from every paid purchase made. My opinion is that this revenue stream for the company helps them support the free version of Unity. More developers using Unity creates a larger pool of asset store contributors and purchasers.

Finding Asset Store Content

From within the Unity IDE (Menu -> Window -> Asset Store) or through your web browser online you can shop in the store. Search by product name or developer name, see featured items, or simply browse based on popular categories.

Categories Include;

• 3D Models
• Animation
• Audio
• Complete Projects
• Editor Extensions (My Favorite!)
• Scripting
• Textures
• & Much more…

To research this article, I scoured the community thoroughly, interviewed top developers on their favorites, and tested out many plugins to build the definitive list of the best asset store content for developers. Here is are the Essential Unity3D Plugins / Packages. All are compatible with both free and pro versions of Unity.

But who is it that is making this great content? Well, there are many prolific contributors.

Asset Store Contributors

As successful developer Daniel Sklar of ProfiDevelopers explains, the Asset Store is successfully being used all over the world. After many years in game development, his team has gained a lot of experience which they pass on in the form of well designed assets. Greener teams can save time and money by using existing content.

In my Unity Asset Store Case Studies article, several veterans discuss their success with the store.

Unity Partnerships

More recently, Unity Technologies has partnered with asset store contributors to market some key packages. These projects may be developed outside of the core company but get favorable promotion, marketing, and exposure.

Popular Unity Partnership Packages

• Everyplay! is a newer addition to the store. This innovative service is a complete solution for monetizing, acquiring and engaging users. Everyplay enables users to share their best gaming moments directly from within the game as video!
• With Kii, game developers get a fast and scalable back-end, powerful analytics and game distribution services, so they can focus on the stuff that matters — the game experience.
• GameAnalytics automatically takes care of all the basic tracking/analytics needs for your game. All you have to do is interpret the results.
• PaeDae is how you monetize your game with in-game advertising without breaking its cohesive gameplay experience.

Unity 1st Party Packages

As developers we typically see new features added to the Unity tool itself. You download the latest version of the IDE and checkout the release notes to see what new features are available. However, a second way for Unity Technologies to distribute non-essential functionality is through the asset store. These 1st Party Packages include complete game projects, assets for learning how to use Unity, as well as for testing your existing projects.

Popular 1st Party Packages

• Complete: Unity Projects: Platformer (2D)
• Complete: Unity Projects: Shooter (2.5D) — With full tutorial videos
• Complete: Unity ProjectsL Bootcamp (3D)
• Learning: Unity Sample Assets
• Testing: Unity Test Tools

Selling Asset Store Packages ($$$)

For years, insiders have know that Unity Devs can make a living from Asset Store. The Unity development community is now larger than ever. Larger audience = larger earnings.

An inspiring article on the Unity Blog explains how we can all Pay for our Indie games via Asset Store work. Although it isn’t easy, making a living through the Asset Store has been possible for at least two years. It all depends on your expenses, the appeal and pricing of your product, the competition, your skills and what you are willing to sacrifice (more on that later).

Using Asset Store To Fund Your Indie Game

1. Stay alive by some means during the early days. Game design consulting was ideal for me. I could do it one day per week.
2. Design your game early on to know its technical needs and requirements (later you will want to identify all kinds of synergies in order to minimize cost).
3. Build some game generic features or content that will be part of your game. Make these modular and possible to “productify”.
4. Sell your content in the Asset Store and use the earnings to fund your game.

This approach has many benefits:

• Starting making revenue DURING the production of your game.
• Learning opportunities: Support, business and economics, marketing strategies, teamwork, collaboration, etc…
• Network with other Asset Store developers
• Encourage modularity in your codebase
• You may FIND existing Asset Store packages that save you time.

Promoting Asset Store Packages

Maybe you’ve created a great 3D model or an editor extension for Unity, but now it’s sitting at the Asset Store shelves and gathering dust. What can you do to sell more and fund your game and your life with your awesome asset? A few really successful publishers have shared their promotion tips and we cooked them up into this advice.

Here are the 10 commandments of asset promotion

1. Plan  : Keep your audience notified of milestones and updates to maximise interest and retention
2. Make demo videos : We love videos to learn quickly what your package does and why its great.
3. Find out where your customers are : You can’t promote everywhere, so make your effort count.
4. Use Forums : There is already a special place to interact with your audience.
5. Tweet : Promote virally. Include a URL too.
6. Sign up for 24 Hour Deals : Apply for additional promotional power via Unity Technologies.
7. Tweak your Pictures : Your promotional pictures (text-copy, etc…) should be clear, concise, and attractive.
8. Consider paid campaigns on Google and Facebook : These networks are cheap provide fast metrics.
9. Consider time zones : You capture a wider ad market when users are awake and at their computers.
10. Stay involved : Harness the power of feedback loops with your existing/potential audience.

Great! After you launch you can promote your work and easily embed your asset store package into websites like this;

My Asset Store

In my 13+ years as a pro game developer, community involvement has always been important. Involvement in groups, conferences, and open source projects helps me stay connected, teach, and learn new things. Its for these reasons, more than just profit that I’m interested in the Unity Asset Store.

Here are the in-progress diaries of a few packages.

• uMOM – Unity Manager of Managers, game framework (link)
• uEventDispatcher – Unity messaging/observer framework (link)

Others of our work are complete and live.You can checkout all of the AssetStore packages we at RMC have created and then explore the case studies below from 3rd-party developers.

I encourage everyone to get involved as a consumer and potential contributor to the asset store. It is an incredibly powerful way to take advantage of the powerful community around Unity.

Unity3D is a powerful suite of tools (Project IDE, Code IDE, run-time) for game development.

As always, RivelloMultimediaConsulting.com/unity/ will be the central location for deep articles and tutorials, Facebook.com/RivelloMultimediaConsulting (like us!) will engage the growing RMC+Unity community, and for the latest opinions and cool links follow me at Twitter.com/srivello.

The Unity IDE offers an Asset Store. If you haven’t yet familiarized yourself with the Asset Store, this is a great opportunity to dive in.  You’ll find nearly everything a game developer could wish for– complete template projects, models of every shape and size, countless textures and materials, an extensive set of code libraries, hours of professional music and sound effects, and a broad selection of editor extensions to bring new functionality to Unity.  Best of all, we’ve gone out of our way to make sure that these offerings are both affordable and covered by a common, easy-to-use license without legal complexities such as royalties.

I think of the store like a free bag of temporary art while I work. More rarely, when tackling a technical challenge I check the store to see if another developer has solved my needs and created a code library. The naming doesn’t seem standardized, but when I say 3rd party code-library, package, or plugin I mean the same thing. I mean a collection of coding classes which augment the IDE itself and/or enable richer development.

Something remarkable, and quite different than the Flash community, is that these packages can actually add functionality to the Unity3D IDE itself. New first-class menus, panels, UI Gizmos, etc… It is truly amazing.

I have asked leading developers and combed hundreds of message boards and forums looking for what the community thinks are the most Essential Unity3D Plugins / Packages. Here is my short list. All are compatible with both free and pro versions of Unity 4.x. Apparently some packages are pro-only. Also I believe all can target any platform which Unity targets (desktop, web, mobile, etc…).

2DToolkit

iTween is a simple, powerful and easy to use animation system for Unity. Focusing on the established solutions and frameworks of projects such as TweenLite, Tweener, and other Flash-based tweening and interpolation systems, iTween is a battle-tested solution for streamlining production in the Unity environment. If it needs to come alive; its shouldn’t be frustrating. iTween exists to help you reach your goals without making the journey difficult, allowing polish to coexist in tandem with production.

I have used this on some proof of concepts and love it. The tile map system does not appear complete with a good demo included (as of 2.0), so I’m eagerly awaiting that.

Price: $65

Link: Developer / AssetStore

Alternatives: Ex2D (35$), Orthello2D (Free), Sprite Manager 2 ($45) & Uni2D ($45), & Many more…

Community Buzz: Look, 2D in Unity is both possible and super powerful. Its also a super popular (more than 3D?) type of game these days. So there are many, many packages to help this. I chose 2DToolkit for my work after researching what was out there. I wanted the most powerful, friendly, ACTIVE project.

Features:

• NEW! The tilemap and UI add-ons are FREE and included with 2D Toolkit!
• NEW! Platform specific sprite collections.
• Automatic atlasing system.
• Pixel perfect rendering.
• Workflow-centric animation editor – Set up large animations in seconds.
• Sliced sprites for 9-slice scaling.
• Automatically generate multiple atlases from Sprite Collections.
• Create automatic and custom colliders.
• Create polygon colliders with multiple shapes for one sprite.
• Static sprite batcher with automatic collider generation.
• Texture gradient support for TextMeshes
• Extremely efficient and lean C# runtime code.

iTween

iTween is a simple, powerful and easy to use animation system for Unity. Focusing on the established solutions and frameworks of projects such as TweenLite, Tweener, and other Flash-based tweening and interpolation systems, iTween is a battle-tested solution for streamlining production in the Unity environment. If it needs to come alive; its shouldn’t be frustrating. iTween exists to help you reach your goals without making the journey difficult, allowing polish to coexist in tandem with production.

I used this on several projects. I feel like it doesn’t do ‘much’, but it does it great. Perhaps coming from Flash with Greensocks Tween classes I was spoiled. Also, the syntax of this could be greatly improved. The author recently posted that a new version is (slowly) in the works. Still, its great.

Price: Free!

Link: Developer / AssetStore

Alternatives: None

Community Buzz: This seems to be a staple tool of every great Unity developer.

Features:

• Easily fade audio
• Move the camera
• Fade, Move, Scale, & Rotate your GameObjects
• Update your Vectors!
• Compatible with PlayMaker (see below)
• To be most useful I recommend the “iTween Parameter Code Hinting” free add-on.

NGUI

This is the ‘Next Generation UI Kit’ or simply NGUI. Unity provides built-in functionality for creating graphical user interfaces (GUI) including buttons and text. However the system before Unity 4.0 was pretty poor and the current system leaves much to be desired. GUI allows the user to create.

I have not used this in production yet. Will probably be my next package to purchase and explore.

Price: $95 USD

Link: Developer / AssetStore

Alternatives: EZGUI ($200), iGUI ($95). Great comparison article here.

Community Buzz: There are some compelling alternatives, but also we see a lot of the community using it, blogging about it, and making tutorial videos. There are packages which add functionality to NGUI too (from NGUI developer and others), so there is good momentum on this and it is in active development. This is one of the most often mentioned packages in “Unity3D Developer” job posts. Its a popular skill to have!

Features:

• Full Inspector integration (Custom Editors)
• What you see in the Scene view is what you get in the Game view (fully WYSIWYG)
• Automatic atlasing system.
• Pixel perfect rendering.
• Component-based, modular nature: attach the behaviors you want to make your widgets do what you want without having to code.
• Flexible event system
• Make complex UIs that take only 1 draw call
• UI Components included: Label, Sprite, Sliced Sprite, Tiled Sprite, Filled Sprite, Simple Button, Image Button, Radio Button, Checkbox, Progress Bar, Slider, Input, Dropdown List, Scrollable List

What’s next?

I am working on an HD Video tutorial series which will include some of these plugins. Your feedback will help me know which I should cover first. Let me know!

What are your thoughts?

Do you prefer an alternative to the suggestions above? Or do you have an additional recommendation? Please comment below.

[polldaddy poll=7181109]

Unity3D is a powerful suite of tools (Project IDE, Code IDE, run-time) for game development. Read my full articles of “Introduction to Unity3D” and “Tutorial Series: Unity3D & C#“.

As always, RivelloMultimediaConsulting.com/unity/ will be the central location for deep articles and tutorials, Facebook.com/RivelloMultimediaConsulting (like us!) will engage the growing RMC+Unity community, and for the latest opinions and cool links follow me at Twitter.com/srivello.

There is incredible momentum in the Unity3D product and its community. Here is a look at the successful game ‘Rochard’ which developers Recoil Games, Ltd created using Unity3D.

Rochard

From the IGN review of the game we learn that Rochard puts you in the role of John Rochard, an astro-miner who works for a megalithic company known as Skyrig. The game’s look works extremely well. Rochard is a comedic game at its core, and its character design, environments, enemies, sound effects and other sonic touches certainly lend to it moving in that direction.

Figure 1. Game Logo

QA With Developers

The site VideoGameWriters presented a terrific interview with Samuli Viikinen (Lead Level Designer), Juhana Virtanen (Lead Designer) and Sampsa Lehtonen (Programmer) detailing Rochard‘s use of Unity3D.

What was Unity’s appeal to your team?

The beauty of Unity is that the game can be published on any of the supported platforms with relative ease. Unity is also really fast and easy to use, making prototyping and implementing new features a breeze.

Often when any of our designers had new tech requirements, a programmer just sat next to the designer and implemented the new feature right there on spot together with the designer.

Figure 2. Gameplay

Did certain features change from the original design during development?

Yes, much. The gameplay itself was done iteratively. Unity did not impose any strict limitations to us, quite the contrary actually.

For instance, originally we didn’t have such a strong physics-based gameplay, but after seeing what Unity was capable of and learning what was possible with its physics engine we gradually implemented a more and more elaborate physics system for the game.

What are Unity’s advantages?

The strong point of Unity is the speed of the iteration cycle when developing the game. Some of the previous engines required us to shutdown the editor for compiling scripts, but in Unity the changes are immediately applied to the engine. This keeps the flow of development going instead of interrupting your work. Extending the editor was also really easy, and we ended up doing quite a lot of tools and small scripts to get rid of some of the laborious repetitive work.

Another feature is the use of so-called prefabs, which stands for “prefabricated game objects”. This allows you to build a palette of game objects that can be easily maintained and placed in the game world. This feature was found in the previous engines too, but they were far more clunky and error-prone.

Figure 3. Cut-Scene

What are Unity’s disadvantages?

Unity is not packed with rendering and animation features out-of-the-box. You can always go under the hood and implement things the way you want – that’s the whole purpose. For the games that we are making, it’s just perfect.

How has the Unity engine used by artists, programmers, level designers?

Unity is an all-around engine, and it caters to everybody in the team. Because it’s so expandable, you can improve the work flow for any discipline if such need should arise. For example, we ended up doing our custom prefab browser for the editor as our requirements for levels in our game were quite specific. We were originally using the industry standard Perforce for version control, but the built-in Asset Server in Unity had better integration to the engine so we ended up using that instead even though it was not as feature-complete as Perforce is.

Critics’ Review

IGN game the game very positive reviews. You can see gameplay footage on Youtube too.

Figure 4. Rochard’s review from IGN

Your Thoughts On Unity?

Are you considering using Unity for your next commercial project? Comment thoughts below.

Already completed a game? Complete this poll and add a link to your project too.

[polldaddy poll=7138686]