Unity Starter Kits, what do you want?!

Unity Engine
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Hi everyone,

Long time no speak? you don’t write, you don’t call.

But seriously, let’s talk starter kits. Something we should have done a while ago but we’re starting to build now as an ongoing project.

Wait, Will - What are starter kits?

A starter kit is something we’ll provide to you from the new Unity hub (our larger scale launcher coming later this year). It’s a project that contains a professional standard code, minimalistic art-style sample game that you can learn from, pick apart, deploy - it’s up to you.

What is a starter kit not?

A starter kit is not a tutorial - we will be documenting each one in written form, dissecting why we approached things the way we did - but we won’t make a step by step ‘build this thing’ style tutorial. A starter kit is also not something you should immediately deploy to android play store having changed the font and …who am I kidding someone is gonna do that. Anyway!

We have so many ideas for this we want to narrow down to the top five you would like to see us make samples of first - and we’d also like to know if we’re missing anything here too. This list and the results of the survey are NOT final - we’ll still make the final call but we want to do it based on YOUR feedback, not OUR assumptions. Check out the survey below, looking forward to seeing the results and thanks as always for being awesome.

TLDR; here’s the survey -

UPDATE: You’ll note an absence of XR content in the list - this is deliberate as we’re planning to provide more of such content in different forms, updating and expanding the VR Samples initiative we launched a while back.

Will

ps. sure the TLDR should be at the top, but you made it this far didn’t you?

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Form permissions!

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Fixed. Dumb defaults to internal only. Sorry!

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This is a great idea. Submitted my selections.

I would definitely spend money for kits like this if they were coded with industry best practices, or at least scalable and robust practices. So you’d need experienced industry professionals to code or at the very least review them – not the same code as we could find in any online tutorial, even the official ones.

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Fantastic initiative.
Some love for XR too.

I was hoping you would do a video breakdown for at least some of the code.
Take for example all the goodness stuffed into the VR samples package.There’s tons of stuff to learn and repurpose.
Videos of some of those techniques would accelerate learning immensely for people new to Unity / programming concepts.

cheers,
b

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Starter kits sound great for the community. I chose 5 that sounded good, but I’m sure whichever 5 (to begin with) are chosen, it’ll be good & it can always be added to.

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@behram - this is

Yep this is definitely the inspiration for more starter kits - taking the ethos of VR Samples - some readymade content and documenting it in detail. We aren’t ruling out some video content relating to these, but chances are most of it will be written. We will be talking about them in another video form however, but we’re not ready to reveal that just yet.

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Mobile Game with all Unity InApp support examples
and Unity Adverts integration example.
Something bit more clever also, real world scenario not just droped in…

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Superb.
Could you also make a starter kit for Audio ?

Thank you,
b

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We actually have a sample project coming on this front coming in a few weeks - we’re shipping it to stores too so we’ve been delayed by legal stuff but the game plus it’s source is on it’s way - keep an eye on our blog and social channels for ‘Trash Dash’ endless runner sample game. Proceeds are going to Game Changer charity too!

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I wrote this in the feedback form, but you should really consider including a Hearthstone-like card game in the first samples. I think that’s the kind of game I most often see people asking about how to make on the forums these days.

I also hope you’ll be taking input from the community on the code/assets/whatever in the starting kits. There might be practices in the community you’re not aware of internally. Since you’re already providing the kits for free with all of the assets (I assume?), you should properly open-source them! Put them on Github, include a style guide, and take pull requests.

I’d really love for you to make an RTS starting kit. The built-in path-finding is quite atrocious, maybe having somebody internal actually try to make something with it would speed up your efforts with improving it :stuck_out_tongue:

I hope that you are aware that unless Steam gets their act together, your Starter Kits will be the new UnitZ: something scammers download, add a logo to, and ship to steam make money off trading cards. Steam’s working on it, but you never know if the “fix” will actually fix the issue.

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Think it’s been a while since anyone thought Unity was any good for FPS games. Usually the default is going to be UE4. Maybe knock that on it’s head or something :stuck_out_tongue:

You should mp network whatever you go with though.

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I have replied, but wanted to share my thoughts… An FPS starter kit would be useful, as it could be used to show the latest additions to Unity, and how they can be used. Personally, I would love to see a top down 2d soccer game starter kit like Kick Off 2 / Sensible Soccer , as that would be a really useful learning tool, as well as allowing me to entertain myself while fixing all of the bugs in my code! ;-).

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Disclaimer: The opinions represented below are mine alone, and not intended to indicate a statement on the game industry / market outside of my limited experience and understanding.

I love this idea, and I wanted to share the options I picked and why.

1. 3D RPG (Simple Zelda like)
FPS are pretty straight-forward. You move your mouse to look around, you press some keys to move, you click to shoot everything you see.

A third-person RPG affords you so much more complexity and types of interactions, and it’d be great to see UT’s take on handling things like dialog systems, context menus, inventory management, enemy AI vs NPC, day/night cycles, etc. I get that we’re talking a watered down version of OoT here and not Witcher 3, but as a place to start, I think that’s fantastic.

2. Turn Based Strategy (Warbits, Endless Space, Advance Wars, Civ)
Being more of a console gamer, I still find myself booting up Civ Rev now and then. Turn Based Strategy appeals to me in every possible sense, and whether it’s a top-down square grid, 2.5D hex grid, or fully 3D dynamic point-based map, I could learn tons.

3. Local Multiplayer Kart Racer (Mario Kart)
Same screen multiplayer is my new favorite thing again since getting my Switch. And it’d be good to see how Unity handles using their own vehicle physics (I dare you to use the wheel collider, I just dare you!)

4. Space / Earth Flight Sim (Flight Simulator, X-Wing)
This is one of those things I’ve always wanted to make but haven’t had a clue where to start so I haven’t bothered touching. People mention floating origins and I just tuck into a ball and cry.

5. Procedural / dynamic game
Might even be a good fit to merge with the flight sim. I think every game can benefit from a bit of dynamism, and any lessons on handling that nicely are welcome.

Not listed, and not suggested, but wanted badly!
Grand Strategy. Crusader Kings 2, Europa Universalis, Stellaris (basically, any Paradox game). Big sims with lots of moving parts. Graphically simple, but processor intense. Random events! Reactive personality-based AI! Show us how to organize and optimize all that crap!

@willgoldstone Didn’t see it mentioned… Do you guys have a rough timeline for when you want to release these?

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We also have a larger Multiplayer shooter in the work that’s separate to this Starter Kits project, aiming to make a large scale sample and also put networking through it’s paces, so yep, that’s been in the works a little while now under a new team formed just to work on that. Can’t say too much more on that yet :slight_smile:

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Thanks for your comments, it remains to be seen how we’ll handle open sourcing this kind of material, it may be that we offer the ‘stable’ version through the hub and then have source elsewhere to grab - we will see.

Regarding your comment about steam see my comment about Android play store in the original post that addresses exactly this :wink:

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Is this server authorative, and is there an eta?

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I can’t share any more details at the moment i’m afraid, sorry.

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voting for ‘don’t add any fancy graphics’, because then:

  • projects will be much smaller (& fast to import… still have nightmares about ethan character normal map conversion progress bar, if changed platform…)
  • faster to release these
  • people cannot sell the “game” as is to steam and mobile stores (its only game mechanics, ‘white boxed’ level designs, so at least have to add own graphics…)
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I would suggest just importing to a new project and then copying over what you need to your project. You can also untick the relevant textures that make importing long. No need to do anything then…

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