I submitted a fairly complex asset with very complete documentation. I went the extra mile to create editor scripts that not only create the tags and layers for you, but even then set all of the layer masks. My documentation is all online in confluence and there is a step by step quick start guide that covers it all, complete with images and editor scripts to check the setup and report if it all went well. The readme in the project has a link to the docs right at the top.
One reason it was declined was because they never read the docs, never did the setup,and of course it threw errors. And of course they failed to send the first error message, the one where my system does a check at startup and tells you the tags are not defined.
Wasn’t even aware of that. Judging by other assets in complete projects it does probably fit there pretty well.
The thing is that the demo requires doing a couple of extra steps after installing. It deals with runtime terrain modifications and other stuff where you really need to understand just a couple of basic things or you will end up trashing your work. And one of the extra steps involves loading the demo state from a compressed backup which saves 150mb of disk space in the install package.
I think I’m just going to add something so people can’t skip the docs. Beta testers didn’t have any issues because I told them docs were not optional. I expected some people to just run the scene without reading the docs, which is why I actually disabled a couple of things by default so they couldn’t trash the scene by not paying attention. But I didn’t expect an admin to get to that point and then not think they might want to actually read the docs.
It wasn’t more then a few days ago I saw someone from Unity calling people stupid for less. Glass houses and all…
Hmm what I did for a project with a similar requirement (it required unpacking around 5000 sprites which took about an hour) was on start-up check for presence of the required assets and if not there pop-up an editor window with a few lines on what was being done and a warning that it would take approximately an hour. The user had only one action in the window: click ‘Proceed’.
Seems like I’m the least experienced commenter to this thread, so I’m not going to pretend to know the complexities of the type of asset you are submitting.
It sounds pretty complicated and if I were a purchaser and user of this asset and the online documentation went down, or was unavailable to me and I had work to get done - I wouldn’t be happy about being at a work stoppage point because the documentation was only available online and it was necessary to follow to set the asset up correctly.
I understand this is not why the asset was declined, but I thought I’d mention - it might be a tiny improvement to also include a pdf or other offline documentation to the package, for the customers, in case this situation ever happens.
Hope to see what this actually is when it gets approved.
This is a smart way to handle it – one mandatory, can’t-miss-it button, with no confusing options. You can use an editor script with [InitializeOnLoad]. You might get away with also adding a checkbox to specify whether to add the demo assets or not. Trust that 90% of your customers won’t read the documentation. They just want to import the asset and play the demo scene to see how it works.