So I’ve been toying around with this idea in my head since I’m very good at rapid-prototyping. The idea is to develop a well documented and solid prototype for any given genre in Unity3D within a week and put the result on the Asset Store. Thats all the code and prototype assets created along with it. I imagine this would be useful for beginners or people looking to develop on a already established framework. Price would be around 25-50 USD I think. Additionally I could also do prototypes upon request.
What do you guys think? Is this a good idea? or is this nonsense since any experienced developer would just code this stuff on their own?
Could you see yourself buying such a prototype given its gameplay or mechanic is of interest to you?
Is 25-50 USD a fair price or should this be lower/higher?
It could be interesting. Make the assets as generically as possible, such as “Mr. Generic Makes Vaguely Sandwich-like Foods”. If the assets themselves are already looking polished and complete with cute characters and sounds and all, then you’ll find fifteen identical barely-changed copies on the app stores. If the assets themselves are very generic, you may find exciting variation, such as “Bertha’s Bake-o-porium” doing good business next to “Pizza Perfection” next to “Santa’s Elves Toy Factory.”
The trick is to build a framework that doesn’t ‘presume’ too much for your target audience, at least imo. Don’t tie me into choices like NGUI, Photon, etc… and don’t ‘style’ it too much either. Keep the code very extensible and ensure you don’t have monobehaviours with tons of attributes and complexity.
I’m an experienced developer and can write pretty much anything i’ll need, but frankly i’m just too short on time these days to re-invent the wheel every time a new game idea pops into my head. If you can present me with a solution that allows me to easily swap in asset store models and building blocks without making game specific design choices for me - i’ll bite.
The TBTK looks really good to me, for example, for this reason. The demo is fairly in line with a couple game ideas I have and so for ($50?ish) dollars its cheap and productive to just grab that and build from there.
The only real issue I can see is that you’ll want to target popular game mechanics to give yourself a wide enough audience.
It would a lot of fun to test different prototypes and different art assets. Who knows, you might end up making a great profitable mobile game with the right combination, at a very reasonable time/money investment. You never know…
Indeed, however this ties into another question that I’ve always wondered about:
Say you create a 2D game prototype/framework that uses 2D Toolkit (or other plugins) - how would one go about making this legit for the asset store? Have there been precedents of such things?
thanks everyone. Looks like this indeed is a good idea
Yeah I will make the assets as generic as possible and I don’t plan on using any third-party tools like NGUI because I feel like they over complicate things. So the prototype will be as broad as possible with a functioning core gameplay mechanic and a few features tide into it.
Do you guys have any prototype wishes or things you would like to see?
