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[Grimwood]

Sorry first of all if this is the wrong place or has discussed before.
I want to get into Unity game development and since there is a sale right now I was wondering if there is any site listing all the "essential" tools you should buy? Of course everything depends on specific things and what you want to do, but still there have to be some essential ones pretty much everyone needs?

I browsed some tools, and maybe those are in that category? Or not? Please help..

Gaia 2
A* Pathfinding Project Pro


Feel free to add...

Thank you!

[litHermit]

It's really hard to generalize. But some organizational tools for inspector/hierarchy are always useful for any project (depending on your needs and preference. I use QHierarchy, it's alright but not great). A tweening library (I use DOTween). And probably some extensive camera-control plugin won't go to waste

[oahda]

 

You might be interested in Rewired (doesn't seem to be on sale tho?) for input since the old Unity input system is very lacking, but the new one that's still in preview is getting pretty good so Rewired might become irrelevant soon. Worth looking into!

Unsure about the A* plugin since Unity has pretty decent navmesh stuff out of the box, especially with the GitHub repo with extras. Might wanna read this discussion (this talks about Unity Pro for some reason but what I'm talking about applies to free Unity where I've used navmeshes before so I'm a bit confused about that) before making your mind up. If you're just getting started with Unity you should probably just see how far the vanilla system takes you anyway. I'm sure there will be more sales down the line! c:

Gaia does look cool! I've barely tried Unity's inbuilt terrain system because I just don't make the types of games that need it, but what little experience I've had has been underwhelming, so this looks like it might be a great investment if you're going to be working with that kind of stuff. Would love to hear a comparison from someone who's more experienced with it!

Good luck with Unity and games!

[TonyLi]

+1 for Rewired, although it's not in the sale.

Some of Unity's built-in packages are pretty good, such as Cinemachine for camera control, and many of its 2D tools. Timeline is OK, but I prefer Paradox Notion's SLATE for sequencing cutscenes.

If you're not a programmer, or if you'd like to minimize the amount of programming you have to do, consider PlayMaker or NodeCanvas.

Among many so-so frameworks, there are a few standouts are that really good if you want to get a head start on a particular genre. In particular: Adventure Creator for adventure games, Corgi Platformer for 2D side scrollers, and TopDown Engine for top-down action RPGs.

However, if you don't have one of those genres in mind, you can get a lot of mileage out of Unity's tutorials. Unity Learn Premium is free right now, so take advantage of it.

[litHermit]

Rewired seems very interesting.

+1 for Corgi Engine! It was a godsend in working on a platformer with no knowledge of how to do custom physics. It's well documented and commented, and as a complete novice I found it relatively easy to work with.

[Grimwood]

Thanks for the replies so far!

Yeah, I also watch the official tutorials and some other youtube stuff.
Still strange to see so little about good "plugins". Therefore it makes everything so hard to judge if something is needed and/or good. Basically I want to have as much "pre-done" as possible - some people might call that lazy, I just don't like wasting time by "inventing" something that has already been done before (probably better) hehe

So, I'm gonna probably start with some of those:

Assets

Low Poly Ultimate Pack
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/low-poly-ultimate-pack-54733
As far as I can judge from the images, this looks like an a lot of value for a low price?

Civil Characters Pack | Low Poly
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/humanoids/civil-characters-pack-low-poly-154474

Tools

Top Down Engine
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/systems/topdown-engine-89636

Dialogue System for Unity
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/ai/dialogue-system-for-unity-11672




Something for later...

Camera Controller
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/camera/camera-controller-13768
No idea if this is necessary or could be done easily without plugin.

DotTween Pro
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/visual-scripting/dotween-pro-32416

Rewired
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/rewired-21676


Dumb question - does something like "Playmaker" and "TopDownEngine" "bite each other or are they both "necessary"?

[TonyLi]

If you're using TopDown Engine (TDE), you don't need Camera Controller for the same project. TDE uses Unity's very capable built-in Cinemachine camera controller.

If you're considering PlayMaker for AI, TDE has a decent built-in AI system. If your AI needs are simple, it gets the job done. TDE doesn't have a PlayMaker integration. If you need PlayMaker to get into the guts of TDE, you'll have to write that integration code yourself in C#. Don't let that stop you from getting PlayMaker for other purposes, though, especially since it's in the sale right now.

Art packs are great for prototyping. If you're thinking of using an art pack in the release version of a game, make sure it has all the models you think you'll need, or that the artist has other packs in a similar style that you can buy later as needed, or it's in a style for which you're capable of creating extra assets yourself or hiring someone to make.

(p.s. Thanks in advance for getting the Dialogue System! If you have any questions about it, just let me know. It does have TDE integration, BTW.)

[raigon]

Here are some amazing tools that I'm currently using for mostly all my project (It is mostly code plugin).
The plugin are very good and are developed by a game studio in japan
Cysharp a subsidiary of Cygames and are use in there games
https://www.cygames.co.jp/en/

1) Unirx  for composing asynchronous and event-based programs it take a functional approach where event use LINQ-style query operators.

2)Unitask Struct based UniTask<T> and custom AsyncMethodBuilder to achieve zero allocation. It really help me with my development and quite good on performance.

3)ZLogger Really Amazing tool for logging. It give you a lot of flexibility with how to log and how to handle logging. You can even save all the unity log and/or custom logs to a log file and/or filter what to write to the log file. Quite good on performance as well.

4)ZString Better low allocation of stringbuilder

5)ZeroFormatter Very fast Deserializer

6)Utf8Json Fast json serializer

7)MagicOnion a modern RPC framework which uses GRpc framework and MessagePack frame work. Amazing tool to use with your network solution

Here are some other plugin that are amazing as well

8)Surge It include amazing tool to use in your script such as Tween, StateMachine, Singleton, DisplayObject, and many more

9)DOtween



Unirx
https://github.com/neuecc/UniRx
MIT

Unitask
https://github.com/Cysharp/UniTask
MIT

ZLogger
https://github.com/Cysharp/ZLogger
MIT

ZString
https://github.com/Cysharp/ZString
MIT

ZeroFormatter
https://github.com/neuecc/ZeroFormatter
MIT

Utf8Json
https://github.com/neuecc/Utf8Json
MIT

MagicOnion
https://github.com/Cysharp/MagicOnion
MIT

MessagePack
https://github.com/neuecc/MessagePack-CSharp
MIT

GRPC
https://github.com/grpc/grpc
Apache License 2.0

Surge
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/surge-107312
Free

Dotween
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/animation/dotween-hotween-v2-27676
Free