It’s been a fantastic week at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, and I’ve met plenty of amazing content developers and creative people with new ideas and products to bring to the community via the Asset Store. One comment/question I frequently encountered was What do your users want or need on the Asset Store? We’ll make it!
So… what would you like on the Unity Asset Store? Please share your thoughts in the following categories (or freestyle it)
Art Assets, incl. models, animations, sound, textures…
How about a Complete/Tutorial project to show how you could make a game like Braid where you can reverse time?
Also a User Level Editor (so users can make custom maps) and to go with that, map saving/loading example. I thought it would be cool too if users could just use Unity as the custom level editor.
Pfft! that’s easy, mate: a makegame button. And a makeitfun script to go with it!
Seriously. I’d love to see more editor enhancements. The editor it’s great don’t take me wrong. Just want more and more of it.
Well I would like to see a new paiement option in the A.S., making able to sell all right of a model.
For exemple, i post a character in A.S., at the very first time someone buy it, he can choose between 2 options
First option : buy all right of the model (for a consequent price), if he do so model is turn off on the asset store, nobody else can buy it.
Second option : buy at copy price (low price), if he do so first option turn off, and all others customers can buy a copy.
some more example projects, like tactics game, tower defense both plants vs zombies like with defined paths and more freely buildable like Tower Defender.
You can never have enough 3d models and animations.
Also more plugins for external apps (IRC? Teamspeak? Glovepie? oh, one can dream).
I have a couple of Asset Store feature requests that I think would help everyone:
The ability to filter content that is optimized for mobile devices (iOS). I realize this is a difficult concept given the breadth of content type. But it’s really worth thinking about how to add that. Perhaps an entire category that highlights content designed specifically for mobile or perhaps a filter that allows you to view content that has been optimized for mobile. It could be as simple as allowing content submitters to flag their content as having been tested and designed with mobile devices in mind. And then having a “mobile optimized” filter in the Asset Store interface. This is extremely important in almost every category. Code: Preferably C# but if it is Javascript it can’t use dynamic typing since dynamic typing does not work on mobile. Models: These need to be optimized for mobile with low vert count and low poly count. Shaders: Have they been designed for the limitations of mobile. etc. etc.
I would make the same filter request regarding C# and Javascript. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been interested in a content sample only to find that the author only provided Javascript code. And there is no way for the customer to know if the author was sloppy and used dynamic typing thus requiring hours of work by the customer to fix all of the code. I’m far far more likely to buy a sample if it uses C# . The best samples have duplicate copies of all classes in both languages. The worst examples only use Javascript and even worse use dynamic typing throughout. The problem is not so much about being able to view the code beforehand, but about the customer has no way of knowing whether this code is appropriate for mobile development. C# solves that. And a “Optimized for Mobile” filter would also solve it.
As the volume of content in the store continues to grow, the Unity team will need to improve the interface to help customers find content appropriate for the projects they are working on. This will only increase sales and encourage content developers to create better content that is attractive to a broader audience. I can already see how the current Asset Store interface is becoming cumbersome for finding content and that is with a relatively small amount of content. There most definately needs to be some kind of filtering system implemented.
I do agree with chaneya about the filter, although most of my code is done on js.
Two more things that would be useful :
1- A documentation generator, specially if it could track functions like SendMessage and getComponent and list or diagram the dependencies, maybe flagging the objects that are being interacted on the editor or list them. This would greatly improve debugging time and could help defining best architecture patterns.
2-A visual GUI designer, like Dreamweaver or Visual Studio’s IDE. This could save deveoper’s time as the graphical components could be handled entirely or at least scrapped or corrected by artists.
PS: Just noticed IRC’s plugin is already on the store wooh!
Ooh, I agree with draad and chaneya. Although with the current number of assets it’s not really necessary, as it grows a system for categorising things would be very helpful.
I’d also rather like a full start-to-finish video tutorial showing the process of setting up an account and putting up a simple asset. I’m sure it’s not all that hard, but the main thing that’s been putting me off posting assets has been how complicated it feels to get started. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’s actually pretty easy once you know how, but that doesn’t mean that numpties like me won’t struggle when starting out.
Finally something I noticed myself doing all the time when I first saw the Asset Store, was clicking on the little pictures of the assets to rotate them. I don’t know why, but it felt like a logical thing for the asset to rotate when I did that. Much as this was stupid of me back then, personally I’d be much more inclined to buy things if I could see them from every angle, not just the best ones. Could we throw in the possibility for sellers to include a small, standardised webplayer for rotating the asset and light in?
Thanks for the suggestions for Asset Store functionality, guys! These are all things we’ve thought about and are hoping to add in and improve. It’s my mission to make the whole experience more intuitive, better organized and easier to use, especially as our catalog grows. We’ve not declared the Asset Store as officially “locked” feature-wise, so it’s not unrealistic to expect some improvements in the future.
But actually my question, though, was what content would you like to see on the Asset Store? At the GDC last week, more than once, I met studio directors who have teams of scripters, animators and artists who have downtime between contract gigs. They want to use this downtime to create what -you- want and bring it to the Asset Store marketplace. So… if you really want something… please share… because they want to make it for you!! Very awesome.
Me: I’d like to see a flexible, all-in-one 3rd Person Action-Adventure toolkit. Something with a really smart 3rd Person Camera. Vehicles you can jump into and drive around. A quality template character which can climb ladders, poles, swing on ropes, jump, double-jump, scale the edges of cliffs. You should be able to sneak around. Basic third person attack (walking up and punching type) and first person attack (shooting/sniping). Basic enemy template with some parameters that you can set for its health, behavior, sensitivity, whether or not it can shoot, its field of vision, etc. Guns. Health packs. It should be powerful enough to make a good platformer like Banjo Kazooie or a 3rd Person Adventure like Tomb Raider. But intuitive enough to be like Lego to use. It’s a tall order but I believe wholly possible.
That’s at the top of my wishlist. We have many good tutorials on similar projects, but nothing that would be a broadly applicable third person adventure toolkit. I’d buy it myself to use in my free time, if it were truly flexible and powerful.
PS @wolfie: I’m working on exactly such a video! It’s nearly finished, but runs a bit too long for my taste. GDC really consumed my energy, but now that it’s passed and I’m beginning to recover from the relentless excitement of the event, I’ll probably have it up in a week or two.
I want to add diving, climb on a tree and jump on top of it and jump from rope to rope to the character controller that Caitlyn and me like to see
I love Benjo Kazooie, Donkey Kong, Zelda, Starfox and Beyond good and evil type of games
What i think that maybe it would be good to learn how to ad this kind of features yourself by another tutorial video that teaches that. I would pay for it.
@Caitlyn
Maybe the asset store should add a tutorial section.
3D Male/Female basemesh model.
Anatomically correct, rigged and textured male and/or female model. Animations are a nice bonus, but if they add to price, please release them as separate pack because I only need the mesh.
What I am looking for is a mesh that is detailed and has a fair amount of polies, not low poly undetailed one(tho different LOD levels would be nice too)
Should be realistic, or how some other say: next gen.
Only one license-type for assets on the asset-store. All assets on asset-store should have the same license and not a lot of crazy different license types. See Turbosquid and that’s right so. All assets for free use in commecial projects.
