Sorry for reposting, new here. I think this is the right forum. Asset store strategy during sales?

News & General Discussion
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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

Some updates after helpful responses I received on the other forum…

It sounds like odin and quantum console are for more complex games then I’ll be making for now, but that playmaker and emerald ai 3.0 would be good beginner assets. Adventure creator looks to also be good for beginners, but just from a quick look online doesn’t have much if any vr support. Would it help still in a vr game for saving, menu, inventory ect? Would I not need something like easy save? Do I even need something like easy save? I do have all tools and assets from the recent humble bundles, I’m just trying to pick the right assets to complement those ones when and while they’re on sale. I like adventure games and it’s possible I could make one later if adventure creator would be helpful making vr walking simulators somehow.

Which would be more useful to get, ultimate character creator with the vr add on or the hurricane vr bundle? Ucc with vr add on is a lot more expensive, but would that be worth it to be able to make regular 3d game character models vs getting hurricane + something else for flat screen 3d characters later on or is UCC good for making npcs for vr games? My first focus is vr walking simulators for now.

I still need to know what organization I’m suppose to be associating new assets with, my name one or my user name one that says personal after it? Or does it not matter? Thanks again.

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Don’t spend a dime until you’ve made a few simple games first. Otherwise you throwing money down the toilet.

General rule, nearly all third party assets are not worth the time, or at best may be useful as an example for learning. Some are great of course, but if you haven’t made at least a couple simple projects first you’re just wasting money for false sense of productivity.

Sales come and go, don’t let the reptilian overlords beguile you.

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Odin Inspector is my favorite asset, we use it in every project. But for a beginner it will probably not be very useful - not that it’s only for “complex” games, odin can be useful for even the simplest of projects but for a beginner, most of the features and benefits it provides won’t be apparent.

In terms of what assets to get, there’s no right answer. Depends on your budget and what you want to do with them.

I think assets can be used for a # of different reasons

  • Add / Improve something in your game (i.e. a framework, tooling, art, audio, etc)

  • Used to learn from (you can look at how they implement certain features, etc)

  • Hoarding

I bought a ton of assets but probably just use a couple of them in my games (such as Odin, A* Pathfinding Project, Animancer, etc). The others are mostly hoarding or was just curious to look at them and see how they implemented things.

I didn’t see you mention these but those ‘game kits’ or ‘templates’ are a good learning experience for beginners if you can find some related to the type of game you want to make.

https://assetstore.unity.com/?category=templates%2Fsystems&orderBy=1

For example if you want to make a top-down game then TopDown Engine is basically an asset that would have most of the basic features in a top down game. A good starting point to learn how different systems are implemented at tied together.

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If you buy any tools, systems or editor extensions, I recommend reading the manual before hand. That’s the best way to find out exactly what the asset does or does not do. Just looking at the screenshots and description will tend to give you the impression that a tool is a magic wand that will solve all of your problems, but in reality an editor tool asset will bring in it’s own set of problems and they may not work the way you expect.

That’s not to say that the asset store pages are deceptive- it just doesn’t have all of the information and your imagination will fill-in the rest. It’s better to read the manual to get the full picture.

Another problem that you might have is that when you try to bring multiple tools into your project they may be incompatible or may not automatically work together. This may not be a problem if you’re good at coding and you can write your own scripts to integrate them, but otherwise you might have problems.

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You likely won’t end up using half or more of the assets you’ve listed. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of shiny assets that make you feel like you’re leveling up your gamedev abilities when you don’t really need most of it. And then time passes and some of them get deprecated and you’ve spent your money for nothing.

A good rule of thumb is to purchase assets only when you need them. It also saves money in the long run, when you get one asset that you actually need instead of five discounted assets you might never use.

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Agreed, but with one exception: humble bundles. You can get a fantastic amount of content for a fraction of the asset store price (including sales), and the chance that you can pick it up again in a future bundle is very slim.

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Odin and Easy Save are must haves imo.

Not worth it unless you plan on using those specific assets. This applies to ALL art assets.

A* is entirely worth it. The rest I really wouldn’t bother with unless you absolutely know you’ll use them.

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Thanks for the responses everyone.

What does it mean for an asset to depreciate, and what are the effects of that?

As far as getting what I need for getting started, to make an environmental vr walking simulator I would think I’d need…

An enviorment. I have a nature meadow from humble bundle, but the reforged big environment pack looks usefull and fairly priced at 40% off for what you get. The dungeons mines aren’t nessesary but would give some variety to the scenery for walking around in, as well as the procedural worlds stamp bundle which has 140 high quality stamps for 60, an entry price from what I can tell compared to the procedural worlds bundle with Gaia 2 pro etc for 400 which I’ll only be able to get if it’s heavily discounted on black Friday in a month.

As for control scheme in vr, I like half life Alex’s setup, especially how the gravity gloves hare handled, followed by boneworks type controls and physics. I’ve read hurricane vr basically does all of that. Auto hands looks interesting, but I read it doesn’t work with hurricane as well or has other compatibility issues.

Playmaker sounds like it’s good for people who don’t know how to code, which I don’t.

Emerald ai 3.0 would probably help making ai with not knowing how to code. I do have some character models from a synthy polygon humble bundle I bought a few years ago and never used, and I have some animal models from the recent humble bundle. The universal poly collection should have any props I might need at only 24 and is to be expanded on over time. Cu cat is only 5, or 3.75 after 25% off, and everyone should have a digital cat walking around while they develop games.

I don’t know what the best animation solution might be. The humble bundle came with very animation, which could be useful, but animation designer makes it look like it’s easier to make corrections to animations and stuff.

I don’t know if adventure creator would help or not. I might wait for that to go to 50% off next month if I were to get that.

I can also upgrade to feel for 15, since 2 of the three components came with top down engine in the humble bundle, and would probably perfer to load that into projects for its resources instead of top down engine since I’m not making a top down game, but could use the vfx.

Some weather asset came with the humble bundle, so I might not need enviro, but would pick it up on sale if it’s a better weather creator system. Maybe vegetation engine too next month.

A dialog system, and maybe a ui system came with the humble bundle too, so I should be good on that front I think.

I don’t know if I need easy save yet or not.

I guess I’m looking at this more from a design standpoint then a coder or developer might. I’m more interested in creating and walking around an environment interacting with stuff to test and see what works and doesn’t to develop a vision rather then focus on the pure mechanics of it all. I’ll learn the mechanics as I go along, I just want to be able to get started faster with everything I might need to get the basics going. So on things like the 400 Gaia 2 pro bundle, which appears to be an all in one environmental terrain solution, possibly being discounted 90% one time a year sometime next month, it would be good for me to be aware of it and work to budget accordingly. Same in general otherwise too with trying to figure out what assets will be best suited to helping me on my goals of this task.

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You’d save a lot of money AND time if you bothered to learn.

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It means it is no longer going to be updated and while trying to get it to run on a newer unity version, you’ll be on your own.

A good idea is to never buy anything unless you can’t live without it.

In practice most of the stuff you “think is going to be useful because of reason 1, 2, 3, 4, 5” will end up collecting dust. That also applies to many gadgets. And it also applies to things “you think look interesting”.
I rarely buy anything at all, but I still ended up buying a few useless things like that. For example, years ago I bought a school building pack that I haven’t ever used. That was wasted money. It was $10, but it was still wasted money regardless.

Basically, for example, in case of steam sales you can avoid wasting money by asking yourself this question: “If you received this game for free right now, would you drop everything and play this game only?” If the answer is “no” you don’t need it.
Same deal with assets. “If you received this asset right now, would you drop everything and start using it immediately?”. If the answer is a “no” you don’t need it for now.

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Playmaker’s a crutch. The power of it is in a custom written library of actions, the community has built it out a lot throughout the years but once you come upon something you want to do and for which no action exists, you’re stuck. And the only way to get unstuck is to code that custom action either yourself or hire someone to do it.

If you want no code solution, Unity already ships with Unity Visual Scripting which is good enough for Unity beginners and teaches Unity a lot better than Playmaker. And it’s free.

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Visual scripting is deceptive. All it truly does is replace the text-based approach with a visual one, and for people who have difficulty reading and writing text it’s definitely beneficial, but it doesn’t eliminate the actual difficulty of programming which is problem solving and understanding how everything works.

To properly learn game development. All of the assets that you listed may very well be great but none of them are going to be of any use to someone who has no idea what they’re doing. You’re trying to run before you’ve learned how to sit up and crawl.

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The only one I know among the bunch is Odin, which, I suppose you can make use of with just the attributes as a complete beginner. Amazing addon mind you, but more so worth it when you have a reasonable idea of what you’re doing.

But honestly, learn to crawl before you walk, then learn to walk before you run, and maybe then start looking at stuff on the asset store.

And seriously, learn to code proper.

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Anybody mentioned that learning how to use those assets well, might also take quite a lot of time ?

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Buy whatever you want. There are tons of things you can learn from assets (whether it’s art, code, etc) that is very hard to get access to otherwise. I’ve always bought stuff that I didn’t know how it worked.

As far as planning what assets you need for a game, yeah prototype first, every game starts with a prototype made of cubes and crappy code, don’t start off with a big shopping spree.

And when you do choose assets specifically for your game, be very specific about what you need them to do, check that they do it, and then as long as the ratings are good and there are plenty of them, you’re pretty much good to go.

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PlayMaker may be a crutch, but what is a crutch except a tool to help you walk better when you can’t walk well on your own yet? Learning to program will absolutely be a huge benefit, but I’ve seen many games released that use visual scripting instead of traditional programming. For someone new to making games, PlayMaker has two big advantages over Unity’s Visual Scripting package:

  1. It’s a state machine system, not visual scripting per se. Instead of Visual Scripting’s “C# programming but with visual nodes,” you set up states and transitions in a state machine. It’s a much simpler, higher-level concept to understand that’s very amenable to most of the tasks involved in a game. I don’t really see the value of a lower-level visual scripting system except as a marketing point.

  2. As PanthenEye wrote above, PlayMaker in particular has a huge library of pre-programmed actions, including actions to work with other assets such as Emerald AI and A* Pathfinding Project. Unity’s Visual Scripting package doesn’t have nearly the same breadth of premade content.

(I don’t have any association with PlayMaker. I’ve just noticed over the years working with new devs that it seems to have the best success rate for people just getting into game dev who want to make games while they’re also learning C# programming in parallel.)

At the time of this post, Humble Bundle (mentioned above) is running a Learn To Make Games In Unity 2022 bundle that includes over 100 hours of tutorials from GameDev.tv, including programming courses. If you’re going to spend a single dollar, I’d recommend that bundle. It has courses on C# programming as well as Unity’s Visual Scripting, although I recommend PlayMaker over Visual Scripting for the reasons I listed above.

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In a literal sense, yes. In this context, when people say “crutch” it typically has the connotation that it’s being used as an excuse against learning to do things properly.

I agree that visual state machines are a great way to do many things. Plenty of studios with highly experienced programmers also use visual tools for some parts of their work. But they certainly aren’t using it because they can’t program. They’re using it because it’s a good fir for a particular job.

By all means, use Playmaker. But don’t do it because you can’t code. As Ryiah already said, to learn to use Playmaker well you’re going to have to learn a bunch of coding related stuff anyway.

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I think FSM based scripting leads new people in sort of a dead end. It’s not really a common way of approaching general scripting in Unity or any other engine. UVS, meanwhile, is closer to actual C# scripting and still has benefits of VS - no need to learn syntax, fuzzy finder, contextual search results, removes a lot of the initial complexity - no namespaces, classes, attributes, etc.

I’m not super familiar with Playmaker, but Unity Visual Scripting interacts with 3rd party content primarily through reflection. User adds C# scripts/assemblies to Node Options, which will automatically create nodes for any public data types and methods. This way it can interact with any 3rd party asset. It does not support any delegates/callbacks, however, which is where a true integration has the upper hand.

EDIT: Playmaker is better for actual production though because current UVS while good for learning is not really great for shipping games that target more than Desktop Mono.