Hey everyone! Once again, as you’ve helped me before, this is NOT a ploy to get eyeballs on my work.
About a month ago I released my “Human Base + Barbarian” package on the asset store. Since then it’s had just a handful of sales, and I’m not actually sure why. I had expected it to be more popular, perhaps more popular than my Dragons Pack, which has become the #1 “Creatures” package (thank you very much for the support!). [If I’m reading google analytics correctly, it’s getting about 1/3rd the Sales:pageView that my other stuff generally gets]
I spent more time and $$ on it (way more) than I usually would.
So I’m wondering if I’m missing something. Often being “inside” my own work, I may not see things the way that others do. Is it confusing? Is it just not as high quality as I think it is? Is it too expensive?
I’d be VERY curious to hear your thoughts about it, and hopefully take some of them into reality to help make the package better for everyone!
Regardless of how much you spent the characters (or at least the stills) look much less professional than your dragons. They have poor skin texture/shader and have a very stiff and square look to them. Although I’m sure its just the poses/animations it almost seems like there is something wrong with the rig.
Once you get to the videos there looks to be a huge amount of content/customisation possibilities, but personally I wouldn’t have gone past the first few screenshots.
I was tempted to buy your Humans pack, but am put off by the lack of variety of body types shown in the images. I would like to have thin/fat, young/old, but characters shown are all ripped.
In this video, it appears that the male and female bases have 3 potential hairstyles - I would expect a couple more.
How easy is it to alter the clothing on one of the humans btw? That is one other factor I would want to know before buying it. In a current project, I foresee having different humans wearing different clothes.
Hi,
I think it is a highly specialized product. It seems to have a lot of custom scripts, which buyers probably don’t want to learn. I sure wouldn’t like to learn an interface about how to assign custom materials and clothes to the character, because I am a lazy bastard
I don’t think that the character is bad quality, but the animations aren’t really great (for example the character walks with very wide steps, as a sumo champion would do).
I think even people who use the asset store like to create their own main characters. That makes main characters harder to sell.
75$ is a bit too much. People can pay 75$, but only to those they trust. Your product is relatively unknown, so people don’t trust that this 75$ is well spent. I think if you had a lot more good reviews, that would be a good thing to this product, because that would mean that others tried this product and find it good, increasing your “trust rating”. Maybe having a sale, or giving out vouchers would help in this.
And at last, I think Asset Store isn’t as stellar income source as it once was, there are other engines around, and Unity isn’t the only one with asset market anymore. So it can be a general thing too, that things don’t sell as well.
Well, those are my thoughts. There are some assets of mine which costed quite some time and money, and don’t sell as well as some others which are relatively simple. So you are not alone
And the project page doesn’t advertise the customization tool properly. The first thing I see is screenshots. And on screenshots models looks like something I could model myself given enough time. Because of that package is perceived as overpriced.
Now, I’m not sure how good the customziation tool is, when UMA is already available and can handle changing limb proportions (doesn’t seem to be the case with your tool). Also, for someone who can code, UI you display in youtube video looks like something that can be written from scratch. (One of the first things I written for unity was character customization system. Then I found UMA. It was a good training exercise, though).
So, because of this, dragon pack looks more attractive. You see, there’s “Makehuman”, poser and other tools that can be used to generate humanoid characters. However, there’s no “makedragon” tool.
I feel like it’s primarily the cost. Just check out the Morph3D assets that are available. A rough approximation to your asset might be the MCS Male: Beast Warrior that costs $15. It requires one of Morph3D’s bases but there are free options among those bases.
In an earlier post @neginfinity mentioned that there aren’t any “MakeDragon” tools. He raises a good point in that there aren’t any solutions for making enemies with a process similar to the ones we have available for humanoids. That might actually be a good niche to try out.
My point was that because there are human-generation tools, it is going to be much harder to sell a humanoid character, unless quality is extraordinary… or unless it is in certain style.
Someone could definitely try to create “make a monster” tool, similar to spore. It is doable, but it would require significant time investmenet - at least few months.
If extraordinary quality were necessary though would you even bother with the asset store?
I wasn’t thinking about a generic monster system but rather more along the lines of a solution for each monster type. Any complexity would be dependent on the creature type. A spider, for example, might have options for changing the overall dimensions of each body part, an option to make it hairy, etc.
It might be a bit of a stretch calling it a tool but we don’t have any solutions like this on the store that I know of.
Replace “extraordinary” with “extraordinary compared to the price point”.
There are some very high quality assets released for free on the store. Blacksmith assets, unity-chan, etc.
Can be done too, and will take less time than spore-like system. You’ll still end up with some general-purpose framework underneath, though… something that won’t generate the whole creature but could be configured for specific type (biped/quadruped/hexapod, etc)
I expected to scroll down and find an image with a line-up of them all side by side, something to quickly show me the contents of the package. It’s kind of hard to tell (without watching the videos?) exactly what I would be getting.
Price is way too much for characters that are not incredibly well detailed. For placeholder art I would not spend anywhere near that much, I would probably make something in MakeHuman, and would spend maybe $10 if a character happened to fit precisely into my game.
There’s something a bit Baywatch about them that I personally don’t like, and the little shields look strange to me. I would want something that looks a little more powerful and rough around the edges, like the guy from Witcher or something. As it is, they look a bit like they’re on a reality TV show.
Also, the idea of making very high quality art packages that don’t go very far in covering the art needed for an entire game, and selling them at a high price, is really not a great idea. An environment package goes a long way, a customizable dragons pack goes a long way (since you probably only need 1 kind of dragon, besides there not being too many other options) but a few of human characters? What about the other hundred or more?
Just imagine what you would think if you were making a game, you had a list of all the hundreds or thousands of assets you needed, and you saw a package that covered a only few for $75? If you spent the same way on all the other assets you’d run into the tens of thousands. For most hobbyists that’s going to be just a bit too much.
Hey! Great feedback so far and WOW I think I made some misjudgments along the way
In my head, I always thought that a humanoid character would be the first thing people get when making a game, since so often the human is the main character. But of course there are other humans on the store. I’ll try to reply to a lot of the things mentioned by you guys – a lot of which was mentioned by multiple people.
Face / Texture quality. One thing that I wanted to do was facial animations. Sitting in front of my camera for hours doing faces to see what works. Unfortunately the cheapest system I’ve found is something like $1500 for a year of the software and doesn’t run on my mac (BOO!!!). Face shift was the software I wanted to use, but last summer, like 2 weeks before I went to buy their stuff, they got bought by Apple and Apple shut down their software. (DOUBLE BOO!!!). I do think it’d be nice if they had faces that moved, right? Would that solve some of the uncanny valley stuff? idk.
Add-on Packs. I wanted to create add-on packs eventually for different “classes” of characters. Each would come with a new male and female face, new hair, and a full set of clothing (like the current, with many options that can’t all be used at the same time) plus new class-specific animations. [In the queue is a skeleton package, and the clothing there should be able to be used on the humans, for instance – and human clothes on the skeletons.] I didn’t like the idea that the knights were always “THIS” body/face, and the Barbarians that. Etc. I also liked the idea that you could mix a barbarian skirt with a knight chest plate, if you really wanted to. I could be wrong, but from what I gathered, the only way to make all of this work would be to have a system that would somehow attach the bone structure from a clothing item to that of the base body. (I could EASILY be wrong, as i’m not personally an artist)
UMA etc. I still want to make this work with UMA, and have talked to a few people in that community. It’s all above my head, unfortunately, so far. I would like the idea of doing UMA type stuff for all of my characters, actually. Beyond just the scale, it’d be great if the horns on the dragon could be resized, or the wings, or if the bumps on the head of the mushroom could grow and shrink per the users desires.
Price. I may lower the price. I priced it as a flag-ship package, expecting that I’d be able to produce much lower-priced add on packs. But considering I spent more on the human than any other package by far, both on the model and the animations, I won’t make any add-on packs unless there’s a solid user base that wants it! So I nee that user base.
I do want to provide a way to change the physical size, to some degree. On the add-on list is “NPCs” which would include less ripped base bodies (but probably keeping the same “Size”, so that the clothing works – unless I can figure out a UMA or similar thing that makes the clothes conform to the body). Similar for “Royalty” which may have a “fat belly” add on piece etc. The add-on packs I mentioned would come with additional hair. It’s very easy to change the clothing – they’re just sub-meshes, to click them on or off.
I’m gathering I need to do a better job of showing the customization options that are present, rather than action poses etc. I’ll see if maybe animated GIFs work in the asset store page. That could help.
The “customization” I have is just the Substance files for the textures. I’d love for the human to be UMA-ified, but I’m not sure how (I don’t do the modeling, and don’t really understand much of the process).
Morph3d only works with their stuff, though, right? It’s not something I can somehow apply to my model I don’t think. Although if there was a way to do something similar, I’d be on board instantly.
For the cost (another reply), Morph3D is being aggressive, I think, since their big money is Daz, which seems to constantly be high-volume lower priced sales.
All in all this is GREAT feedback. If you have more, let me know . I certainly have a lot of thinking to do later today during a lunch break or something!!
Morph was/is supposed to be releasing a tool to create / modify items so that they work with their system, but their forum communication seems to have dropped off completely in the past few months and I haven’t seen anything about it recently. (I do still get emails about new add on packs all the time though.)
Just to reiterate a bit, I think you need to look at your package from the point of view of someone making a game. Most art on the asset store is going to be used as placeholder art, and $75 for a few pieces of placeholder art, when people are used to getting stuff for free (i.e. the whole engine!) is asking a bit much of your average Unity dev. There’s simply no way to justify that cost for something that isn’t final, when not only you have so many competing products, but also character creators that could do a decent job of furnishing a whole game’s worth of human models, of all shapes and sizes.
I also thought human models would sell well at first, when I first thought of selling on the asset store it’s the first thing that sprang to mind. But if you browse around, they don’t sell anywhere near as well as even low-quality environment packs, and I’m sure it has to do with Makehuman (for ‘lower class’ games) and Daz3D/Fuse (for higher quality games). Btw Fuse just got bought by Adobe and is free afaik, so you have some free wipeout competition.
You know what I think will sell well? Clothes and armor. Someone even posted recently on the Asset store thread about this. It’s easy enough to generate a human base model using a character creator (since human form is ‘standard’) but clothes and armor generally need to be created by hand. That’s where you can play to your strengths.
I think people would want character generator and clothes for the character, because they might have specific human in their mind, not “any” human. Also, unity has mecanim animation system, aniamtion controllers can be swapped between different characters, etc.
So, someone making a game will be either looking for a very specific human on the store, similar to what they imagine (which they probably won’t find), or for a tool to make that character. When someone wants a dragon in their game, however, they often don’t need a very specific dragon, almost any dragon would do.
Beyond the money, it’s extremely difficult to get different assets by different authors to match up in terms of style and quality. A pack that includes several characters (or whatever) that actually match in style is huge.
You’re just selling it badly. Nobody wants to sit through videos of you setting up characters until after. Seeing a screenshot of 30+ variations immediately tells you at least a handful can be useful to you.
The name of it is awful. “Human Base + Barbarian Pack PBR”
What?
The content is great - better than most indie games will achieve, but you need to know how to clearly sell it, so nice job starting this thread.
Regarding UMA, that’s pretty terrible for our needs, we evaluated it, saw how terrible the performance would be and how difficult it is to work with in a real production, and skipped it. So there’s definitely room for competitors.
@Steve-Tack I think that the day someone comes up with a relatively ‘standardisable’ way to create and attach clothes to bodies (maybe they have? I haven’t been looking) then people will go straight for character creators (I know I would!), since they can make the faces exactly the way they want. So maybe in the long term (beyond 1-2 years) selling packs of characters who match in style only because of the clothes will not be a good investment, and selling base human models will only be worth it if they are compatible with people’s chosen character creators.
Since creating the art itself of clothes/armor is pretty much impossible to standardise into a generic ‘clothes creator’, and such art can probably be reconfigured by animators to work with any system that comes out, it’s probably a good long-term product.
Since the OP wants feedback of all kinds, I’ll comment that I really think the armor/clothes/material design is not great. They don’t tell a story, they lack character IMO. The girl looking up and holding a sword in one of the pictures looks like she’s wearing kitchen gloves, and the materials look almost modern. Don’t take it the wrong way, I think the artistic skill is there but some of the design choices were not great.
Maybe it’s personal preference, but I would want someone that looks a bit more like they’ve been through the war, someone that looks tough, rugged and wearing some practical armor, bit more like this:
