Asset Store Birthday Bonanza Sweepstakes! (Extended to the 13th)

Holy macaroni!

Our Asset Store just turned five years old! This makes me a little misty-eyed, so I’ve shared a sentimental little toast to the humble beginnings of our little store and its journey towards greatness on the company blog. But we’ve got a lot more to share than sentiments, because this is a big day for us, and we’re ready to celebrate! While we at Unity will be stuffing ourselves silly with fancy cakes, wearing garish pointy hats and blowing on party horns, you can join the fun by spending all your savings and then maxing-out your credit cards on our super-awesome Birthday Bonanza Sale. Or, you can take a shot at winning our Made with Asset Store Birthday Bonanza Sweepstakes. Preferably you should do both.

First, the Birthday Bonanza Sale. To celebrate our fantastic fifth, we’ve put some of the Asset Store’s top-notchiest, cream-of-the-croppiest packages on sale at a substantial savings! You’ll find super deals on content from our most popular publishers, including Quantum Theory, Gaming is Love, Manufactura K4, Beffio, Rachan N, Jean Moreno and more. We encourage you to buy everything in the sale, and then go buy some more assets on top of that, to celebrate and help us pay for the keg.

Secondly, the super-awesome Made with Asset Store Birthday Bonanza Sweepstakes, running Nov 4th to Nov 13th. No purchase necessary to enter (but, really, don’t let that stop you), just write in this forum thread your best story or anecdote about a project you made with Asset Store content. We’ve got fifty-five Asset Store voucher codes worth $50 to hand out to our favorites. Tell us how the Asset Store helped your production, class, project, or evil scheme. About the assets you’ve used, your experience with them, and do share any links you have to the projects you made. Impress us, make us smile or laugh, pull at our heart strings, tell us how much more beautiful your life has become. By the way, be sure to check out the official Terms & Conditions of the sweepstakes.

tldr; Asset store turns 5. Holy macaroni! Best sale ever! Offering 55 vouchers worth $50 for fave AS testimonials. Buy more assets.

Important: Please disregard Isabelle's post below about closing the event on the 9th. We are continuing to run the content til the 13th. Thanks!

 

Happy birthday Asset Store!!! Glad to be able to make you grow every month. Cheers @Caytlin

 

Happy Birthday from 3DForge as well !!!

I started 3 years ago after becoming unemployed and have not looked back one day.
In fact, if I knew how great this adventure was going to be I would have started sooner.

I am a one man business working hard to build a trusted brand with consistent quality, giving back to the users by even updating older packs with more contents as I learn more.

Thank you to Unity and also to all the users that have supported me through the 3 years

I am glad to be part of the Unity family as a publisher.

Cheers
Cobus

 

Happy Birthday and congratulations to all the people that are part of the Asset Store family.

 

Happy birthday Unity Asset Store!

I have been relying on the Asset Store to speed up development of many projects but it was one of my earliest experiences that kept me coming back. I think it was 2-3 years ago I was working on one of my final projects in college. My first asset purchase, ScoreFlash, was being used heavily throughout the project. Somewhere along the lines I broke it and was in full panic mode because the project was due in 2 days. I spent hours trying to figure out what had gone wrong but eventually caved and tried contacting Jashan Chittesh (developer of ScoreFlash) directly. To my surprise by the time I woke up he had already responded with a solution and of course all I had to do was check a single settings box. Not only did Jashan's fast customer service save my project but it really sold me on the value that the Asset Store could provide. Now I am really proud to be a part of the publishing community and hope I can live up to the standards that developers like Jashan have established.

 

Happy birthday to the Unity Asset Store! Without you, I would be far richer All joking aside, its been a life saver. From video playback on mobile, to the amazing Marmoset Skyshop, the newly released Gaia terrain builder, and even down to the Primitive UI pack, all of these assets have helped me produce high quality solutions for clients. Without the asset store, I would not be able to do what I can today! Thank you to the Asset Store team and all of the amazing developers that support it.

 

Happy birthday asset store! For me, game development wouldn't even be a possibility without the asset store. As a first time indie developer with a small resource pool, I might be able to do things on my own and have something to release in 40 or 50 years.. But at my age, I may not have that long.. lol

My experience with the asset store has had its ups and downs since I discovered Unity. Unfortunately it seems like a lot of things get abandoned but there are some true gems out there and through their discovery, I have not only acquired wonderful assets to use within my development cycle but have made some awesome friends with their developers as well. Without awesome assets such as the 3DForge art in his medieval packs, Manufactura K4's Underworld, Will B's UMA models.. Then Fernado and Joen (and the other folks) developing UMA, Adam Goodrich with the newly released Gaia, Nicholas of Gaming Is Love with ORK. All of these just name a small few of the tools that are now in my toolkit and are taking some of the heavy lifting out of my development.

As an indie / hobbyist, I've probably spent more time beta testing assets helping with their development than actually developing over the past year. So nothing really to show for my investments yet. But hopefully within the next couple of years I can bring my vision to life. Again, without the asset store, even a couple of years would be out of my reach!

 

@caitlyn, Too bad that sellers can withdraw their assets when they want and the buyer can not download the asset what he buy never more and when you send an email to assetstore@unity3d.com for help and they (Ben Stoneman <support@unity3d.zendesk.com> ) just tell you that you can not because the asset has been deprecated, and you lose the money you've spent on the asset

You should protect the buyer invests in the Unity store allowing them to download the asset even it has been deprecated and not disagreeably respond to emails asking for help.
And you should be able to fix that first before you celebrate @caitlyn

Regards,

 

Wow awesome, happy birthday

 

Thanks everyone!

@arkhament: Hmm that isn't how we want things... how about emailing me directly at caitlyn(@)unity3d and let's have a look. Be sure to include the invoice # and info on the package(s) and let's see about getting you sorted...

 

great @caitlyn, thanks I will send you

Regards,

 

Last year, 2014, I wanted to finally make a game by the end of the year. I attempted to make a team with a few friends and It fell apart quickly. I knew that Creating the models, learning to Program FPS content and AI would take years to just get started. After a friend gave me advice to "stop trying to reinvent the wheel," i decided to go to the Asset store. I picked up playmaker, UFPS (@VisionPunk ), and Shooter AI . Also, I picked up an Scifi Pack from @Hedgehog Team. after learning each system, and how they can work together, I released SiDefect in December, which can be found here: http://skwiggs1983.itch.io/sidefect



Now, I continue to invest in asset store content to help create my next game, a Turn-Based JRPG mainly featuring Assets by @S4G4N (3D Forge) and @gamingislove, without these assets, I would not have been able to complete anything within the time that I had available, and each asset store purchase I've made came with great support.

 

Happy Birthday Asset Store

The biggest problem with the asset store is also perhaps one of its greatest strengths - there's lots of good things to choose from that it's hard to know what to choose. It just goes to show the wealth of talent out there, from those providing art assets, to coders, to utilities that help you get even more out of Unity.

I'm a hobbyist developer, and as such much of what I'm doing in Unity is still in the experimental stages as I try and figure out which direction I want to take my project. Assets from the store that I've purchased have given me so many ideas that it's hard at times to stop thinking of other things to try out and just knuckle down and get something passed a prototype.

I've found many of the asset store publishers to be very approachable, some of whom have even become good friends. They've offered encouragement and advice and even what I've been able to accomplish now is leagues ahead of where I'd expected myself to be as a hobbyist.

The asset store builds projects but also builds friendships.

 

Happy birthday to the Asset Store!
I've only been apart of this wonderful site for a little over a year now, but I am grateful that I am. I've gained much experience, and much more joy in my creations, all because of Unity!
So thank you!

-Aquarius Max

 

happy B,day Asset store
One thing that people sometimes ignore , and don't mention much is that asset store is not only a marketplace but also a great "Learning Source" . just when i was wondering how they achieved the look in monument valley .. i fount marvelous techniques on asset store . similarly A* , Apex path ,Rain Ai ,Grids Pro etc all AAA solution for your game with top notch support . new to unity programming ? need native functions for mobile ? well you have so many quality options to choose from asset store .
one more thing i like to mention is that asset store has made quality assets available at affordable prices across the globe .

i was wondering when i stumbled upon famous android game "greedy spiders" that how it can be achieved . googling it i found out they used A* algorithm or some variation of it . So i Purchased "A* Project". after about a day i had my own greedy spiders engine running .

Also Reviews has been a great guiding force on store , from so many market places , i have found that asset store reviews are best . they are to the point , relevant, genuine, and really helpful. so many times i have relied on reviews to make decision to buy and they have never let me down.

for an indie developer Asset store has provided the strength and workforce of a full fledged studio.


i have learned so much , by following the code purchased from asset store

Thank you Asset Store for being a reliable mentor.

- Anuj Raghav

 

I've been around Unity for a LOOOOOOONG time and things didn't really take off until there was a strong curated source of assets that could be used by game developers to build quality content. As powerful and cool as the technology is, without the asset store - much of Unity's success would remain unrealized.

The Asset Store is the place where many games come to life... and may wallets/budgets go to die

 

Happy birthday to the Asset Store!

I started using Unity around the end of 2012, at the time being a full time university student. I've mainly used free assets at the time developing some of my projects, longingly wishing to be able to buy some of the premium stuff (such as the Wii Buddy). At the time even $25 seems to cost an arm and a leg.

As a full time indie dev now, I've spent quite a lot on the asset store, just for the simple reason that looking at the quality assets inspired me to create better, presentable projects. I mainly use to them to create coursewares for school students, but I consider the purchases I've made "investments" of sorts for my future gaming projects.

I'm a pure coder with no art skill whatsoever, and the 3D models on sale are much cheaper compared to other sites, where a single model can cost $10 while here $20 can give you a complete set. So this is definitely a huge plus for me.

Support is kind of hit and miss, some publishers responds within a reasonable time frame, others goes days/weeks unnoticed. But usually when I get a reply the publishers are very helpful.

p/s : Some assets that I've bought includes :

Various 3D models [characters and environment]
Cinema Suite [for the Kinect Mocap]
Uber Standard Shader [didn't take long to convince me to buy it once I open the examples]
DOTween Pro [I've jumped around several other free tweening engines before, this one seems to combine the best of ease of use and feature complete]

 

Happy Birthday Asset Store
i love this place

 

Happy Birthday Asset Store!

We built the prototype of Lord Of Decay in under a week with 1 great idea and a handful of assets.

• Winter Pack by Manufactura K4
• Army of Skeletons by Mister Necturus
• Necromancer by Many-Worlds
• Warlock Playable Character by Mister Necturus
• Behavior Designer by Opsive

In 3 weeks we had a playable build we put in front of other people which gave us enough info to pursue pre-production.

Eternally grateful to the Unity Asset Store and the publishers of great content. We simply could not have done it without you guys.
Thanks!

 

Since you are asking about how the asset store made life sweeter, here is a cool little fun fact...

I had a well paying full time job as a programmer working for a nation wide group of companies and at night I worked in Unity. 18 to 20 hour days for months on end so finally it came time for me to choose. When I told my boss I am leaving to become a full time freelance Unity developer, he literally laughed in my face. 4 years later and I am still going strong but the funny thing is that on the very first year anniversary (to the DAY) of me working full time as a unity dev, I went on 24 hour sale and made more money that day than I ever earned in a full month. Next two years I was always in some or other sale that same month and every anniversary month the asset store shows me I made the right call to pick love of the job over all else...

 

Happy Birthday!
As a student developer, the asset store helped me a lot. I cannot afford to hire an actual team, but buying assets becomes close enough. Some assets, such as Dialogie System for Unity or UFPS, I could have avoided and made an alternative, but their quality plus the amount of time it saves makes it a no-brainer to buy. Thanks again Unity Asset Store for a great 5 years.

 

Right now I am developing Augmented reality zombie rail shooter and I used only 3D models from the Unity Asset store. No graphic designer was harmed "used" and I had a playable prototype with extremely sweet graphics during a week. Right now I am proceeding on the Apple TV to make billions of course

 

Happy birthday to all our friends at the Asset Store from all of us at Cinema Suite! Proud to be associated with all of you! Great to see some of you using our software as well! Here's to another great 5 years! @caitlyn @Kamio @Ian Dunlap

 

Happy birthday Unity Asset Store five year !

 

Congratulations to the Asset Store team and the Unity community.
One thousand thanks for bringing us this phenomenal workshop of creativity!

 

This is excellent! Happy Birthday Asset Store team!

I doodle a lot. It's how I start every project I ever work on. A year or so back, I doodled a little knight guy and sparked an idea that wouldn't let go. I digitized the guy, I made some photoshop comps, I animated him. I was ready to rumble with this idea. One problem... I couldn't code to save my life.

Not long after... a tweet popped up on my feed. "Asset Store Sale! Playmaker! Make games without code." (Paraphrasing probably...) At the time I was whole-fully against spending any money on this little hobby of mine. But that idea I had was not going to let me forget it existed. So I swallowed the chunk of change and I haven't looked back since.

Touch Screen Inputs? No problem: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/3322
Save solution? Piece of cake: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/768
Object Pooling? Done: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/3769
Native iOS scripts? In a heart beat: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/7421

That game idea became a reality and it was the highlight of my year. #madewithassetstore

http://bit.ly/Orcs100

It's been played over 1,000 times and has a 4/5 rating on GameJolt. The highest score is 981! I can't even reach 100...



I could not have done it without the Asset Store and the team behind it. I'm grateful. To top all that off, last week I submitted my own Asset to the Asset Store! So here is to hoping I get to be a part of the next five years!

All the best,

Bridin

 

I'm not a game developer but I make music for the asset store... And a lot of developers chose my music for their games! I would like to thank them and the asset store for this opportunity and for the great work!
Happy birthday!

 

I started with game design when Virtual Reality became a thing after the DK1 Kickstarter and when I got a DK2 with positional tracking suddenly miniature worlds became very fascinating to me.

So I had the very cool K4 Top-Down interiors already and they looked gorgeous, but performed horrible on the DK2.
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/18139 Thanks to the asset store I also found the right tool to make that asset shine in VR - the Mesh Baker (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/5017).

So by just piecing together just two elements from the asset store the right way I got some of my first street cred in the VR scene for "The RPG Room" techdemo which was for a while the #1 rated app on Oculus Share and had over nine thousand downloads.

https://share.oculus.com/app/the-rpg-room

That is now about a year ago - since then my library of assets has grown considerably and it allows me to make VR games as a one man indie that look like small studio productions!

So Happy Birthday and Thank you

 

My best story was from a GameJam a few years ago.
Though it probably isn't the kind of story you're after, I still smile when thinking back on it.
Now, I've never been very good at actual story telling, so bear with me, but it goes something as follows

The theme of the jam was, I believe, something to do with changing the world.
The rules allowed for the use of assets, and since our game called for a first person controller, and I by chance owned a copy of Ultimate FPS Camera we decided to just go with that, instead of writing up our own.

Our vision was a game against the hunting of endangered species in which you play a pander who throws javalins at hunters, one of the most simplistic idea's I've ever run on but with such an inexperienced group, we also had to be realistic.

I'll have to admit that we ran into our fair share of challenges during the jam, everything from beginners errors, many of the others had never been to a jam before and they were all very new to Unity, so much of our time was wasted on trivialities.
To make matters worse, half way through saturday I got a virus on my computer that caused me to loose my internet connection (no scripting reference, no version control etc.), and it also slowed down my computer. Avast hadn't initially caught it but after scanning for around three hours (where I stole some much needed sleep).
We were finally on the right track, and about two hours before deadline we had sort of reached the bare minimum of our vision, but felt good enough about it to make a build and put it up.

The game built without errors, we uploaded it, together with our graphics, sat back and collectively exhaled a sigh of release, until the neighbouring group came knocking to ask if our panda was actually supposed to launch a javalin each frame, or if that was a bug.
Well.. no that was not supposed to happen, and it hadn't happened in the editor...
Starting up the editor again, nope editor version works fine.. starts up the web build, and a steady stream of javalins is launched from the pandas hand.. something's not right here.. builds again, still the editor version is fine, but the new web build complains about a null reference exception but doesn't give more info.. I looked at the log, and there really wasn't anything to go on..
I spent the next 1 hour and 50 minutes throwing ideas at it hoping something would stick. I end up empty handed, and when it comes time to show our creations I'm having to do it in the editor as the game is still broken, and so it the version we handed, embarrassing x3
The following day I show it to a friend in school, who takes one look at the log, and as he does that, we both instantly point at the same word in the log, and after a quick google, it turned out that Unity recently had updated their build pipeline to only include shaders being used, and UFPS used a few that were only referenced in code. One click later the entire game functioned flawlessly, in the end we all had a laugh over how something so small and insignificant could make such a big difference xD

 

The game btw is hosted here:
http://thelogan.itch.io/panda-hunter

 

"you can join the fun by spending all your savings and then maxing-out your credit cards on our super-awesome Birthday Bonanza Sale. "

Haha this one make me smile.

I really like the Asset Store its only my wallet that doesn't XD

Anyway happy birthday!!

 

Happy Birthday Unity Asset Store!

Here is my story for the sweepstakes:
I'm in this moment a engineering student with a passion for modeling and videogames. With a friend, we started a game a few months ago and at this moment we have a solid development hoping to release the game in a few months.

One of the biggest challenges we had was camera movement around the scene in a cinematographic way. We wanted to have some aerial movement in a smooth way so that when our users were in that animation, they could see the beauty of our game. We first started using lerp. It was a simple enough approach but it was just to simple. To create an algorithm that would let us manage the speed, rotation and different variations and angles from a camera trough lerp was quite impossible.

After half a week spent in this development we decided to search for assets that would let us do what we want. And we sure find some great assets! But one caught our attention named iTween. ITween is a free asset for Unity that enables developers to move, rotate and do some awesome jobs with gameobjects! And the best part was using the visual editor.

I must say the results are impressive. We coded what we need in half an hour and with the visual editor we made the paths for the camera in a couple of hours!

We are really happy of finding this quality assets for our game and we only can say: Thank you developers and thank you Unity for making our development far more easy and fun

 

The Asset Store is probably the best thing that happened to the Unity3d Community. With out the Asset Store I would be able to publish my first game. And with out it, it would be VERY boring to develop games as an Indie Developer. The Asset Store makes it FUN to make games. And I check the Asset Store on a daily basis. I have a limited budget to buy assets, but that does not stop me from "Window Shopping".

Happy Birthday Asset Store. May your next 5 years be even better!!!

 

Happy birthday asset store!!

For software engineering last year I created a pretty epic first person shooter. All the textures and special effects came from the Unity asset store. The most impressive part of the project was the flame-thrower turret by Forged3D! The whole class was amazed and I got a 4.0.

 

Happy Fifth Birthday Asset Store and thanks to all those involved!

Without the Asset Store and all the wonderous assets produced by the ever-growing community of talented people, I doubt I would have ever had a reason or the incentive to write GYA.

P.S. - My wallet has never forgiven me, nor do I forsee it doing so anytime soon!

 

It was the Bonanza Sale two years ago that changed everything for me.

I'm was at an Institute to do a degree in Production Art, with aspirations of being a 3d environmental artist, when a class about Unity was in the works. It was all artists of varying interests, no programmers, no game designers. I agreed that in my team of 6 that I'd handle the role of Technical Artist, wound up also being the Producer and General Clean-Up Artist.

It's about then that I was looking at the Asset Store started up the Bonanza Sale with some awesome marques and splash art. Icebox Studio's Adventure Creator went on sale, alongside that was Jean Moreno's Toony Colors Pro (since my team was going for a NPR look) and Amplify Studio's Amplify Color.

All of a sudden I realized that we live in a day and age where someone/anyone can get a hold of some rather complex tools to make a monumental task (like making a game) achievable. It was an eye opening moment of actualization.

Between the "Hey, I can do this with the right tools" and a sudden rising need to make the sort of things that I care about... I'm on a new path to what I believe is a more fulfilling life (not to say that there aren't still lots nights where sleep gets prioritized below learning/troubleshooting/crying/pipeline reassessments/more crying). So thank you kind folks at Unity and the wonderful Asset and Framework Makers. You're changing the world for the better.

 

It was probably about 5 years ago that Unity and the asset store began to change the lives of several of us here in Lexington, Kentucky. We started a small game developers group, and eventually formally organized and called ourselves RunJumpDev.org. As a group we decided to use Unity so we could all help each other out while learning and hacking away at our own little projects. Every Tuesday night we have met for our Unity Hack Night for as long as we've had a name. We've participated in the Global Game Jam every year, and have been grateful for the generosity of Unity and the Asset Store for events like that. It's because of those little nudges many of us continued to move forward. Unity continues to grow and get better, becoming more available to those of us on small budgets with big ideas. The Asset Store has provided the means for so many of our groups' projects to become what they are, and really has become a keystone for our group. Whether we are needing art or tools, the Asset Store has been there to help us fill in the gaps.

Just two weeks ago we completed an event here in Lexington we called Haunted Pixels. We only had one month to create a Halloween virtual reality experience (code name HVRE) and only 6 people who could give some time to the event, most of them less than a few hours per week for the most part. We needed assets, and the Asset Store provided. We were able to successfully complete the event and introduced several people to Virtual Reality and the Game Developers community we have here in Lexington.

Small game dev companies are continuing to blossom from our growing group, as we continue to reach out and find more and more people interested in the field of games and interactive media.

We are extremely fortunate to have such a wonderful group of people that are open to helping each other out, and be completely supportive of each others successes. I think this is due in large part because of our choice to use Unity so many years ago. It has had the effect of unifying our group, and giving us amazing tools and assets to work with.

So, thank you kindly Unity, and happy birthday Asset Store!!!

 

The asset store hasn't really helped me do anything spectacular as a hobbyist, but it's allowed me to play around in a virtual world in ways I never thought possible. I've enjoyed using the Bige Environment pack and Arctic Castle packs to build really cool looking worlds (with some terrain help from RTP and Terrain Composer.)

I've actually just learned C# from looking through code from scripting in packages like Ootii's motion controller. Overally it's just been nice to play around with these things!

 

To me, the most important thing when you purchase a good asset is that you're not just purchasing something that will save you time and possibly money. You're purchasing a well documented tutorial in learning the exact things you want to learn.

I'm relatively new to game development, so I don't have much to show for myself at the moment. But, what I've learnt from the asset store with the purchases I've made - like setting up a AAA quality locomotion and camera like the one in Third Person Controller by Invector or the manipulation of time with Chronos by Ludiq - makes everything worth it to me. New assets come out, new ways to think, new things to learn and new ways of taking all of that, putting it all together and creating something amazing. Or, better yet, learning from it all and writing a better counterpart yourself.

 

All my life, I’ve search for a means to tell my stories.

As a child, I drew. As a teen, I wrote. As a young adult, I photographed. Although my passions welcomed progressively increasing success, none of them adequately expressed my stories. My stories are not silent – they are neither sequential nor intended for quiet observation. My stories are meant to evolve, to react, and to surprise even me as the author. Games have always been the medium I sought – but until recently, games were inaccessible to me.

I’ve always dreamt of making video games, even since I was a young child, constructing “levels” in a word processor and using the cursor to navigate them. Unfortunately, until Unity, I’ve always lacked critical elements to bring my stories to life. It feels like I’ve been in possession of the adhesive, but lacked the parts themselves.

The Unity Asset store has been my solution. Just as I can create bonds, but not parts, other equally passionate individuals can create the parts, but have no way to affix them into a meaningful experience. The asset store brings creators like us together.

Without the Unity Asset Store, I would not be making games. My games, and ultimately, my stories, would be invisible and silent. Those simply aren’t the stories I am meant to tell. It was the chance discovery of Unity, and the collaborative potential of the Unity Asset Store, that has inspired me to dedicate myself to the pursuit of making video games.

Only time will tell what creations will ultimately arise from this union, but surely, I will always owe a debt of gratitude to Unity, and all of the other artists whose dreams may intermingle with my own along the way.

Thank you all, and be well!
- S.

 

Just want to say, thank you Asset Store (Caitlyn, et al!) and all the creators and buyers!

Besides the fact that I buys lots of cool assets for that "super game", I have an eBook on the Asset Store. Not advertising here, because I need to find time to finish the copy-editing, but it continues on it's way (monotonically!)

Asset Store == Coolness!

Plug: Buy Emil's Behave2!

 

Happy birthday Asset Store! We hope that we can share more birthdays with you

My story for the sweepstakes is a small one but it was huge for me at the moment.

I'm a computer science student (in my country is called informatics engineering but is almost the same), and I started working with Unity in December of the last year. In february my university made a competition for an event we had named Open Campus, where students from many schools visit the university to know about the programs it has.The competition was (in a general way) to made a project that attracts the most people possible to a specific program using some innovation. Of course, I picked unity

The competition lasted only 15 days. We had that time to get that project running, the main problem was that it was individual and I was completely new to Unity and don't know anything about modeling.

My project was to make a racetrack around a 3d model of the university, but the car must be controlled using a leap motion, not the keyboard. The terrain was made using Unity terrain and an image from google maps as reference. Then i took like 70 photos of the university for textures and to have a better idea of the main objects that the place has. I found many of the objects that are in my university in the asset store. Mainly trees, benches, some light posts, and a lot of plants and bushes that gave my project a bit of realism.

Then i gathered more objects for the racing part. I used a lot of assets from the Toon Level Kit from hedgehog team. That was a lifesaver! For the car I used the Shanty Town: SUV from Unity Technologies (that was a pick from my girlfriend ), and for the leap motion I used the leap motion core assets, also available in the asset store.

The buildings were not downloaded from the asset store since I needed them to be almost as the real ones. For this ones I learned google skecthup and made them in there.

Finally my last problem was the leaderboards. To make this I decided to use Parse as server, and connect everything through their asset in the asset store. As you can see, everything was possible thanks to the asset store.

At the end I won the first prize which was a macbook air and I gave it to my girlfriend as a gift

I attached some screenshots from the final result. Hope you like my story as much as I do

 

Here's a WIP on one of my courseware, in case anyone is interested. (Pics or it didn't happened )
https://e922cfcb9d1596be5a3b5d32444...host/0B5ae3WB0vVD8ZDUydzlYcFpyRTA/energy.html

It's a Science learning software for school students, implementing AR for some of the experiments.

Some assets used :
Particle Playground : https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/13325
Gamestrap UI : https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/28599
Simple Gravity : https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/17006
DOTween Pro : https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/32416
TextMesh Pro : https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/17662
Vuforia, to be replaced with OpenCV : https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/21088

 

Happy Birthday Asset Store!

I know on my end, I've been able to use many of the assets on the store both in personal projects, and as educational experiences, learning from some of the best creators in the dev-sphere to become a better dev myself!

A side-anecdote, I was tinkering with the morph character system, and the invector third person character controller, trying to see if I could meld it into a few projects I've been working on. It was late at night and I must have fat-fingered a few controls, but managed to scare the ever living ba-jesus out of myself when several instances of the character in various points on the map started triggering every jump-scare, event trigger, and monster instance on the map all at once as I tried to navigate the scene, and all those instances started moving about... I won't claim the scream was girly, but it most certainly wasn't manly, and my roommate was much displeased with my 3am antics.

 

Happy birthday to the Asset Store!

I’ve invested considerably in my Asset collection, and in doing so haven’t held back in contacting the publisher’s for support and advice. My experience so far has been incredibly positive and I’ve also made some great friendships along the way!

I’ve currently got a racing game in production which is powered by iRDS with the roads made using EasyRoads3D. Jose (iRDS) has been absolutely amazing with his support and assistance along the way.

Looking forward to the next 5 years! With the consumer release of VR just around the corner and some serious increases in GPU power coming it is going to be an awesome time to be in game development!

 

To paraphrase a favorite author:

With the Unity3D Asset Store at my side, I forbid my imagination - and hence my design - nothing!

Picked up my first few assets:

Gaia: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/42618

Village Exteriors Kit: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/38045

 

Happy birthday!

I actually hadn't bought any assets (until today) since I'm still pretty new to unity and I wanted to focus on the coding part before I started putting money into all the awesome assets on the store.

There is simply no competitor to the asset store on the net imo, unless you want to fork out an insane amount of money to hire artists and modelers, so I'm grateful it exists cause I am the opposite of artistic and I don't really have a ton of money either so I dunno what I would do without it. Tbh, even if I was able to make my own assets I would have bought them on the store instead, seeing as that would give me more time to focus on improving the game, and some of the assets are simply beyond my knowledge - I would never be able to create some of the extensions available.

Before I go to sleep at night I like to browse the store and find new items to add to my wishlist, and just try to imagine how the game will look with the assets, and what extensions to get first - there's just so many must have ones. That's my favourite part of the day, cause I get to realize what my game will look like .
I have quit university to hopefully be able to do what I love the most on full time - create games - and if I succeed, the asset store will be a big reason why, and of course the helpful community.

Since this is such a great sale I ended up making my first purchase today even though I won't be using it for quite a while. But there are also some really helpful free assets on the store, which have helped me immensely, like the complete characters and their included animations, an awesome pathfinding solution, among many others. So even for people like me (well, up until today) who haven't bought anything yet, the asset store has provided some very useful free assets.

Thanks to the free assets I have been able to create working animator controllers without having to create my own animations and models, which would've looked catastrophic too. Once I decide to focus on the graphics I will have a solid base already, with the transition coding already done and working as intended.
I also have to mention the awesome PlayerPrefsPlus: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/6637, which has saved me some huge amount of headache by letting me save arrays to the playerprefs.
Last but not least I want to mention PUN: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/1786, such a great networking solution that's both free and incredibly user friendly. I probably forgot a lot of stuff but I'll stop here .

 

I started using Unity about 3 months ago, and I have to say that the developers, by and large have done an excellent job in providing non-programmers like me excellent tools and a level of support that goes far beyond the price they charge. I found out about Unity by chance after seeing it mentioned a few times on the Steam forums, and after downloading the personal version I became instantly hooked on its ease of use, but most notably, by the asset store which seemed to offer everything a developer could want or need. I have always wanted to create a virtual ecosystem, with the focus on life-like animal behaviours and interaction, not for financial gain but for personal interest as I've always been a big fan of nature documentaries. Not being technically-minded nor particularly interested in technology, without the assets I've bought this would have been impossible.

For programming, I've been using GameFlow, which has has been put together in such a logical way that I've been able to put together little scripts in no time at all. The landscape I am making is with Gaia, which again has been super easy to use yet the results have been fantastic (although I still have a lot to learn). The vegetation I use is from Yughes Plant & Weeds pack v2 which contains literally hundreds of different fauna all at a very high quality. The animals I bought are all from 4toon, and again are extremely high quality (not just the models but the animations as well) and they've given me a really good level of support. However the asset and developer which has most helped me has been Ice Creature Control, which doesn't just offer highly believable AI but the developer's support has been second to none. One of the greatest problems is getting the different assets to work with each other (compatibility) yet the developer of Ice Creature Control creates his own 'Plug and Play' adapters, which he makes soon after someone requests them. The next asset I plan to buy is either Unistorm especially now the developer is adding a climate manager, which will be fantastic for my ecosystem, or Time of Day, now that the developer has added an actual star positions.

My best advice to anyone else starting out with Unity, would be to first wait at least two weeks before buying any asset, and secondly to pay special attention to the smaller assets by the new developers. I have one asset which has been around for years, the problem with it, and I imagine with others of similar maturity, is that they have been developed to such an extent and complexity that to get into them is quite difficult, especially for non-programmers. Not to mention that (arguably) you get a far better level of support from newer developers (incidentally ICE, Gameflow and Gaia are all relatively new), and are generally speaking, more affordable.

All in all, I'm very pleased with the Asset Store, for me it's a key (and for me, vital) element of Unity and I hope to see it continue to grow in the future.

Here is a little prototype test demo of the ecosystem I'm using, using the aforementioned assets, although still a year or so off completion.

Finally, I would also like to recommend Offroad Pickup + Animated Hands, which despite being only $2 offers what I believe some of best vehicle physics in the store. Also 70:30, who not only has given away many of his skyboxes for free, but also updated his Smooth! Orbit Cam after I requested limits to the panning system. Finally, the developer Unlock, which offers so many good quality assets in a wide number of areas. Although at present I only have his fly system, I have his Vulture flock pack on my wishlist.

 

Happy Birthday Asset Store!
I've bought many an asset from the asset store. While I don't always use them all in my projects I often buy assets as a learning aid. I've learnt a huge amount about coding by purchasing others assets and seeing how they work within a project. Keep up the good work Unity and I will be making more purchases from the asset store in the future.

Anthony Collins