New here. Best asset store strategy on upcoming and current sales for beginners?

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Hi, I’ve been a long time gamer and also vr’er since a year after the rift came out and upgraded to the index a year ago. I’ve recently picked up several tools, assets, courses, sfx & Music for unity game development from humble bundle and a few other courses from udemy, and spent a few days assessing the asset store because of the sale now and upcoming black Friday sale. Anyways I think I’m going to learn unity, c# and probably python too if I can, but keep in mind I’m a complete beginner to all this stuff. I guess I’ve played enough of different peoples games that I’d like to see what I can come up with. I have a few thoughts here and there for game or vr title ideas I could work with. I’ll probably lean towards general walking simulator type stuff for vr and add new components as I learn more in unity. Anyways I made lots of lists of assets, and would like to hear your recommendations on how to best go about picking up assets by priority of usefulness and time saving on a budget for the current and upcoming black Friday sales. I have one coupon code for 25% off my first order which will only work on items that are not on sale, and two 10% off coupons from humble bundle that work with sale items. My thought is to use the 25% first on any must have beginner assets, one 10% off for any assets on sale in the current sale and the other 10% off on black Fridays sale. First I need to know what organization to associate them to. When I registered the humble bundles I had to pick between one which said my user name followed by personal, and another that just said my name. I picked to register the humble bundles to my name cause that is what it appeared I should do, I emailed unity to explaine this to me or correct it to the other organization that says personal but they have not responded to me yet. That was a week ago I emailed them and am without a good response yet, which I need in order to make sure I am buying the assets on this list to the right organization. Please tell me if you know and know why I have two organizations, one with my name and one with my user name that says personal afterwards. Thank you.

So to the list…

First purchase 25% off coupon, only if needed or better to Learn with then without, or wait for sale?

Odin inspector
Playmaker
Emerald ai 3.0
Possibly easysave
Cu cat

Are they needed, or significantly help? Or wait for sale? Any you would change for walking simulator vr or other vr projects?

10% off humble bundle coupon for current sale…

Big environment pack $45 on sale can’t remember the name but it’s like trees, Grass, and a Castle
Hurricane vr bundle $78
Low poly universe $24
Animation designer $31
Possibly procedural worlds stamp bundle $60
Possibly quantum console $24
Possibly modular Dungeness or Dwarven caverns or something it’s called $27

Thoughts? Changes? recommendations?

Guessing at black Fridays sale based off of last year’s reports, final 10% off coupon…

Possibly Gaia 2 pro bundle for 50-90% off
Possibly A" pathfinding 50% off
Possibly Ram river 50% off
Possibly enviro 50% off
Possibly aquos 50% off

Thoughts? Changes? Recommendations?

For good measure I’ve also installed blender and unreal, material maker and sound particles explorer though unity will likely be what I learn first.

So that’s the strategy I’ve put together so far to get started. Could you give me any insights or things to consider or possible changes to make? Also what pipeline do you recommend? From the little I know I thought urp might be best for walking simulators in vr. Thank you for your time.

  • Will
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As an Asset Store publisher, I should say buy everything. :slight_smile:

But as a fellow game developer, my experience is that I’ve never used many of the assets I’ve bought licenses for on sale. I’ve been happy to buy them anyway since I never know when I’ll find a need for them in the future.

I recommend blasting through as many of the introductory tutorials as you can before the presumed big sale season. This way you’ll have a better idea of exactly what you need to make some smaller-scoped VR games as first projects before tackling bigger ones.

PlayMaker is a good first choice because it works with practically everything, and it can make it easier to make your game do things if you’re not up to speed on programming yet.

Since you’re doing VR, a VR interaction framework such as Hurricane is a must. There are others, too, so I recommend reading through their features and reviews before deciding on one. But Hurricane is quite popular. Some character controllers, such as Opsive’s Ultimate Character Controller, have VR addons, too.

When making a game, it’s generally a good idea to graybox your environments first. This means using simple gray cubes and spheres to block out your environment so you can focus on how the player moves through the level and how you implement the gameplay mechanics such as interacting with things, without also having to think about filling in the environment with pretty details. That said, get some environment art assets early. It really helps with motivation (and for showing off your progress to friends and family) to be able to run around a cool-looking environment, even if you don’t end up using that exact environment in your actual game.

Consider some low-poly environment assets, too, such as Synty’s. They take less GPU power to render, so you won’t have to delve deep into optimization right away.

You’ll want creatures to move around in your game, so an AI asset like Emerald AI is a good choice.

Also look into Icebox Studios’ Adventure Creator. It bills itself as an adventure game framework, but it works well as a general game framework, too, with things like menus, save system, inventory, etc.

All that said, if something strikes your fancy and it’s in your budget, use your discounts to get it.

Good luck, and have fun on your game dev journey!

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Regarding coupons: these may not be applied to assets already on sale, depending on coupon and sale conditions. Be prepared for that. :wink:

My thoughts on the assets that I know and used:

  • Odin: great stuff! Only … I don’t use it, and have rarely done so over the years. One issue is, you either have to have a complex project and/or design your own Editor GUI tools for this to be paying off. The serialization wasn’t ever something I needed.
  • Hurricane: if I ever made a VR project again, it’ll be a must-buy.
  • Quantum console: again, like Odin, it’s something that only pays off in complex projects. It’s simple enough to add a GUI button to your game, and toggle the debug GUI canvas on/off, or quite simply just hook debug commands to keyboard shortcuts.
  • A* pathfinding: it’s a must have for any project that benefits from better pathing behavior of agents. So practically any project that has more than two agents doing pathfinding.

Final recommendation: don’t spend too much all at once. You may think you need all of that, but maybe in three months your interest shifts to a completely different game. That is very common. So be sure to get those assets that help you NOW rather than those that MAY be helpful sometime down the road.

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You can take a look at this thread for a selection of assets in combination:

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There’s also an alternative:

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/landscapes/ultimate-stampit-collection-221299

Works with Gaia and with MicroVerse:

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/terrain/microverse-core-collection-232976