How Unity's Asset Store Changed The Game Industry | Design Club!

Hello, Janet. You're not allowed to panic. I see that comment. I see that comment right now. I see your comments about panicking. When are you allowed to panic? Not now. Haha. Panic, panic, panic, panic, panic. No, no, no. They can have a little panic as a treat, but like not a lot of panic, right? Not not a lot of panic. Um, hey Will, you know what I just managed to do? What? See ads, realize that my subscription had lapsed, and resubscribe myself before somebody sniped me and did me a sub again. Very nice. Good job. Yes. Uh for anyone uh curious on um here on on Twitch, there is somewhat of a tradition um where uh the staff uh get their personal accounts gifted subscriptions to the channel that they work for because they forget to resubscribe. So despite the fact that we do not indeed need them and are perfectly willing to do it ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um should I be concerned? I mean about us always. Always always is

good. Um, all right. So, Will, do you know how many windows I have open right now for what we're about to do today? I think this is more windows. Buddy, buddy, do you know that that's the number of windows I have open every time we do this? This is your professional gig. That's true. That you're you're not wrong. Um, I'm seldom wrong and actually very happy to admit it when I am. Usually I can learn something from that. That's fair. Learn. I have learned today you open more windows than I do normally. Yep. Though I don't think you beat me on tabs. I believe my tab ball makes you panic. I I I I believe that. Um now I have a very salient question for both Brad and Janet based on some feedback we got. How do we sound? Do we sound okay? I uh it it it Matt and I took a a brief look at this earlier and um it wasn't like anything astounding to write home about, but we did do a little bit of adjusting here and there to try and make

Jeff and I a little more level and to uh up level on our volume. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Okay. Cool. And I believe I have I have adjusted Well, I have gained something today. Yeah. What? You You've gained I increased my gain and therefore I have gained something. Well done. Well done. Okay. Uh great great great. Thank you. Thank you all. I cannot tell you how excited I am for our topic today. As mundane as it may seem, I feel like Well, okay. So, so as the title would suggest, we are going on a theoretical We're not going to buy it because we don't need it, but we're going on a theoretical $5,000 unity shopping spree. We'll talk more about that once we do the intro. And Jeff has been pitching this idea for six months. Six months. Isn't the dollar sign supposed to go before as opposed to Oh, sorry. Never mind. No. No. Now it's too late. Now you've drawn attention to it. Now people will wonder. Now people Yeah, I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for you meddling kids. Um,

pull off the mask. That's right. Aha, old man Smithers. That's right. I was trying to inflate my property value and you meddling kids. Anyway, um, was that included in those Scooby-Doo liveish action movies as well, so that that meme continued, or is that only known to people who watch the cartoon a long time ago? I I would be shocked and somewhat appalled actually if that particular trope didn't make it into the full liveaction ones. Um, yeah. So, so Snackens, uh, right, the other way to look at this is what can Kickstarter money actually buy us? Yes. So, uh, the reason that we're talking about this is that, um, the Unity store is kind of a really cool place to get started. So, we're going to we're going to intro all of that. Um, we're going to get started here momentarily because we did start late and we want to get into this. Um, oh, that's right. We we should actually theoretically start the recording before I start my spiel about how excited I am on this. Correct. I have one other item of business. You're at the beginning of this. You're at the beginning of this in the VOD. You're at the beginning of this in the stream. If you are somewhere

where you can leave comments, aka YouTube, or you're watching this on uh well, you won't be watching this on Nebula or you're watching it on Twitch, uh or you're in the Discord, Jeff and I are planning to do a designer ride along next week for a game. And we've got I I would I would say too many ideas. At least that's my problem. I have too many ideas. I would like to know what you all would like to see. Is there a game that you would like Jeff and I to spend about an hour poking the first hour of maybe maybe poking a little deeper? What would you like to see us take and put under the microscope? Last ride along have been things like checking out actually different character creators. We did a good one on Boulders's Gate and then another one on Monster Hunter Wilds. Monster Hunter. Thank you. Checked out the monster train separate game demo. We've done ride alongs for shoot against the storm. Like actually any number. Actually, we didn't do Against the Storm. We haven't done

Against the Storm because I don't like Against the Storm because it gives me analysis paralysis looking at the UI. Oh yeah, I I found that too. Um any number of games have just kind of ridden along. In fact, Will's very very first stream as an Extra Credit streamer was a ride along for the Monolith Productions game Fear. Yep. and fear if you can get it running which will manage to do with some pretty cool hacks still holds up as a pretty badass um it's great I I I def there there is one of I'm not normally I don't like horror as a genre and I feel like fear cuts the cuts the very thin line between action game and horror game in like the suspense category just right. It really does. And one of my favorite clips of me ever is um there's a there's part where you're walk through an office and there's like the the those big slat curtains, right? You know, it's not real like cloth curtains. It's like a bunch of slats. They're like back with

plastic and they hang in front of the thing. They're like a privacy curtain kind of. And one of them blew into the like one of them blew into the hallway out of the and I saw it out of the corner of my eye and I turned and dumped an entire SMG mag down an empty hallway and it was it it is a spectacular game. It does require heavy patching to get it to work because they made a bunch of because it was released in um 2000 04. Yeah. Early early early. Mhm. Um, so yeah. Uh, my old tangent, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, Total Warhammer 3, but that's a joke. Um, I see Forza Horizon 5. Interesting. Actually, racing games aren't really my forte. But I think that could be interesting. Come here, kitty cat, if you But I will I will be taking all these suggestions into account, and Jeff and I are going to meet next week and plan which game we're going to do. So, we got time. Um, so without any further ado, I think we're ready to start a

recording. Uh, so if you're new here, hi, welcome. You'll get the full intro in a second. We're going to go to black for a mere moment. Uh, and then we're going to start a recording. Um, and uh, we'll we're going to be doing that for our friends over at Nebula. And then we'll do a show and then we'll stop the recording, but we'll still be here. We'll do some after action business and then we'll be done. Cool. Great. Excellent. Awesome. I see a VOD screen and I want to turn it [Music] black. Good time zone internet. Hello and welcome to Design Club. The only game design show on the internet where there was a cat and now there's not and there might be a cat again and you don't know. I'm your humble host. Ah, there is a cat. I am your humble host, Will, joined as always by my pal Jeff and Persible, who is living up to his name.

That was a pretty good purr into the mic. Yeah. Hi everybody. I am Jeff Rzak and I'm the studio director of Extra Credits and longtime video game designer and I'm here with my companion Will. I am will our live content producer, voice of the people, analyst, enthusiast, and uh all around just sort of uh will of all trades if you will and I will. So I am uh we have an excellent topic for you today. So Jeff, you've been excited about this topic for six months. I I would say conservatively six months. Um pi pitch pitch us this idea. Okay. So today we're going to go spend some money in the Unity store. And this is a really interesting thing as a developer. Mhm. Well, you're making a face. Is my volume okay? No, you're fine. You're fine. Okay. Just making sure. Yeah. This is a really interesting thing as a developer because for those unfamiliar,

game engines are the thing that you build games in. And there are several big commercial game engines. Unity and Unreal being the two biggest game engines. And for a long time when I started deving, you did not go buy game engines. You had somebody who put one together on your team. You you had you had the in-house engine and you were going to like it because you still had the, you know, the giant floppies or the punch cards that that engine was written on and it was what you had by Thunder and you were going to program in it and learn all the skills to program in that language. Yeah. Yeah. And this was a serious impediment honestly to early game development. Actually, it was a it was a pro and a con as many of these things are because the engine that got built was hopefully the exact engine your game needed and maybe you could reuse it along with that. But it also meant you were building your game engine while you were building the game. So all of the tools

associated with making a game were getting built while you were building said game. And this was not an optimal solution. My very first commercial game was EverQuest and there were parts of the game engine that just did not work as we were doing parts of the development or that weren't optimized. And we like Oh, go ahead. That means you can't QA those features. You can't you can't uh balance test those features. You can't do anything with stuff that just doesn't work or let me give you an example. Or it means there was just no time for certain things like our level editor. I built a couple of edit edit levels didn't have a copy paste function. This meant every single thing you built in there you built by hand every time you built it. So if you were building a room with columns, you built every column. There was no importin function. There was no copy paste function. Like this is what lack of tools means like at

an even basic level. Yeah, that's um that's kind of terrifying actually. I'm gonna be totally honest. And like years later when I was working at Monolith Productions, our sister team was The Matrix Online. And we had this Oh, what was her name? Was it Kiko? We had this badass fashion designer modeler who was building all the clothes for the Matrix. And building clothes for the Matrix is a big thing. Like Matrix fashion is Matrix fashion. And they had, I believe it was three body types of PCs you could play, male and female. So that would be six bodies. And once she finished each piece of clothing, she would then have to manually adjust it to fit the other five sizes of bodies. And like a year after I got there, they hired a tools programmer who in about half a day made something that would automatically resize all clothing to the other sizes for her. But she'd been

doing this for two years. So basically at least half of her time was spent resizing assets. So she could have put out twice as much Yeah. as she did from half a day worth of tool engineer work. And this is where when you start hearing about commercial engines like Unity and Unreal, this is why like these are so commonly used now is because all your basic slates of tools come with the game engine. Yeah. These are engines that have been professionally developed. In some cases, they've been developed for 20 years now with Unity. Yeah, I think 20. Yeah, that that sounds about right. At least 15 like for a while and they keep building on it. And so in nobody today Oh, go ahead. What do you I was I was going to mention this uh this this comment from Pin King. Uh first off, thank you so much for that super

chat. Second off that like a game like Payday 2 was designed in a racing game engine because the studio knew how to use that engine, which is wild, right? Like that's that is the kind of thing we're talking about here. And one of the things that like Unity and Unreal attempt to not solve, but like mitigate some of the downsides, I guess, right? And the biggest downside is that they are a universal engine. Meaning it is not an engine optimized for one particular game or type of game. They are engines meant to be generally applicable and usable by almost every game. Yeah. So there are occasionally still games that will build their own engine for a very specific need that they need their game to pull off because they think it's going to be more efficient than using an offthe-shelf engine that can then be modified. But these cases are few and

far between. Sure. Like GTA, actually I'm curious if the next GTA has its own engine or if it's just using hyped up Unity or Unreal. It'll probably be Unreal, I would guess, right? Like we there are certain tells like if you play enough games you can tell. So one of one of the very interesting ones is lots of indie Unity games. I know that they're Unity because they uh don't know how to exist as not the main window. That's a common Unity like developer thing, right? Is that they assume that you're always going to be focused on that window and if it's not the focus of the stream then it doesn't know what to do as an example, right? So, um that's a um you you you kind of get a sense of what they do and what they don't and what the common problems are. Yeah. And anyway, so one of the things that has grown up around these um the Unity and the Unreal store, but particularly Unity is a whole

whole ecosystem of developers who make not games, but things for people who make games. And Unity very quickly saw that this could become an interesting thing and set up the Unity store and initially they put some of their own assets in there and b and then said you can upload things here we will review them. So everything I believe in the unity asset store is they call it moderated by unity. I'm not exactly sure what moderated means, but that that implies at least some level of checking. And all of those assets are basically designed to be used easilyish in Unity if you're using the Unity engine. Unreal does this too. They honestly just started later and because of the way the ecosystem works, the Unity store is just bigger. Yeah. And so what this means is if you're using

Unity, you can go to the store and get some free stuff. That's pretty cool. There's a lot of groups that put out free stuff as advertising for it's like here, check out this low poly pack and if you like it, I make a whole bunch more. So it's a great way of checking out how good their assets are and actually bringing them in. everything up to fairly expensive paid things that cost hundreds of dollars. But reframing that hundreds of dollars, say you're going to go, will there's a Let's go look at a thing for a minute, actually. Sure. All right, cool. So, we're going to we're going to bring on in this here monitor. So, uh you may notice uh that this is going to move back and forth. Jeff has one of these. I have one of these. Bounce back and forth as is appropriate. Let's see. Actually, let's go over here for a minute. Um, low poly asset pack. Let's go find an expensive one for

a minute. Oh, Poly Perfect. Poly Perfect makes awesome stuff. Let's go look at what Poly Perfect has. So, this is $120. That's a lot of lattes. $120 is not pocket or is not cheap by anybody's stretch of the imagination. If you're just like, I'm just going to go spend $120 polies today. But if you look at this video running for $120, this is a set that they keep adding to of low poly assets. And if you buy it, you keep getting everything they put in this set. So for $120, and this is one of the things I love about the Unity store is kind of like the Steam store. You'll get their initial trailer and you can go look at things, but you can start seeing they're

basically selling you. Here we go. This is the number of models in each of these sets. You know, 38 model Egypt set. There's 32 dishes, 125 building parts, 286 sci-fi assets, all the scenes from these separate different bundles that they sell together. I think there's 202 apocalypse models. That That's probably my favorite. I'm wonder if we can find apocalypse in here. But if you look at this, you're buying more than a man year. If I went and hired an artist to go start putting this together, this is more than a man year's worth of work. Well and truly. And all of these are actually one of the cool things too, this works in the built-in Unity engine. Um, and the two basically um the universal render pipeline and the HD universal render pipeline. any set any way that you are importing assets into

Unity. All of these assets are guaranteed to work. Oh, there you go. Oh, eight years worth of work with free monthly updates. So, $120 is expensive, but you are also getting enough assets that if this is the kind of game you're making, this may be two man years worth of art because you're not going to use everything, right? two manurs worth of art that you could be using 10 minutes from now. Yeah. And that's the magic of this. Okay. So, now that we've kind of like taken a look at one of these, I want to I want to address a really great question from chat real quick. Uh which is um what's the difference between this kind of purchase an asset, use it for your game, and what what some people will negatively refer to as an asset flip, right? Is a what term? asset flip. Um, and and I think uh I'm gonna I'm

gonna take a shot at this and then you can course correct me if I'm wrong. My thought is that uh it's about the intent, right? If you um asset flips usually Let's define asset flip real quick. Yeah. Uh are um generally regarded, I would say, as lowquality games that exist because someone has assets to use for it, not because there's an initial driving force or market need for it. um would be my is my general impression. Let me think about that, Jeff. Yeah. And I would say so part of it is the intentionality behind it. So like one of the reasons that the title says $5,000 Unity store shopping spree is five grand is a little less but roughly what a junior programmer makes in a month. So, what I'm comparing this here is, well, I'm starting to make my own game, right? I'm relearning Unity. Sure. I am going to see if I can pull off a one

maybe two or three person game that I think that I've been running around in my head that I would like to make into an actual release on Steam. I think this has a pretty good chance of being an excellent game. Okay. I am an excellent game designer. Sure. I am not a great programmer. I am not a great artist. Um, I know how to do a little bit of both. But I have a very exact idea of what I would like to build. There are certain parts of this that I don't care about. If, for example, I'm doing a low poly art style, I don't want to go build every table. I don't want to go build every piece of a castle. I don't want to go hire an artist to spend a year putting assets together. that I think with the treatment I'm doing, I could use offtheshelf assets to get 80% of what I want and then maybe hire a contractor to do the final

um putting the extra polish on. Mhm. And assets are just like 3D assets are just a part of it. Yeah. But in the same way you don't go program an engine from scratch, you use Unity. In the same way you don't go program a physics systems from scratch, you use Havoc. And that you don't go implement a multiplayer system from scratch, you probably just use Photon. Like a lot of these are literally commodified pieces of your game now. And some like art is actually one of the things that I may consider not using the most, even though I think it's what most people think of when they're like, "Oh, go buy an asset from the Unity store." Like the art is interesting. There's some like check this out. Polytopia, the group I was just talking about. Hold on. And this can also be good for like anything you want to use it on. Wait, am I on the right page now? Hold

on. Come here. Where are you? There. Here we are. Come here. They made low poly dinos. Well, they're rigged. That's amazing. They have animation. Yeah. For 20 bucks, I can go get low poly animals that will wander around. There you go. Check these out. Including, let's see, attack, idle, death, roar, walk, like animations. So, if I want to set up a scene where away in the distance you see dinosaurs moving around, I don't need high poly models. I can use low poly models. For 20 bucks, I can go get all of the low poly dinos I want that are already animated and I can just set up a scene and have it go. Yeah, like that's great. That is an excellent use of things that

if I was having to go hire an artist to do this would never be in my budget for an indie game. Right. And it's worth noting that like these are all um this is sort of a a very interesting way that taking a step back and looking at the games industry as a whole, right? Um jobs at major studios are unstable, unpredictable at the moment. We're having a a touch of layoff problems in the gaming industry, right? And so this is another way that artists, programmers, we'll talk about this, right? Because when you think asset, dear viewer, I we're about to break your asset idea in a minute. But yeah, right. Like you normally think of art. Oh, this is so much more than art. This is so much more than art or or any sort of um what what I would consider like a thing that the user sees, right, is available here. And so, um, this is a really interesting way to sort of match people up with people who want

their work and and to help people find freelance work in the games industry, which I also think is really good right now. Um, because the games industry is having a year. It's just having a year, chat. We'll talk more about that on breakfast at some point. Yeah. Hold on. Where did my select Jeff is juggling more windows than usual today because he's driving one of these and he's not uh Jeff only has two monitors, I believe. I do. I'm about to set up another one. Let's see. Just highlight it. I have a third monitor just for this. Um, wait, where's the one where I can highlight things? Uh, it's the dashboard. Show me your dashboard. You might need to click on the link at the top of the bar on the right hand side of the main window and then you will get a box that says dashboard. Yes, because three chat windows isn't enough. I obviously need

you don't need the other ones open. You just need the dashboard open. Oh, does it Will, can you do me a favor and click on 20 for a prototype from dog? Yeah, this one. So this is absolutely the most common use case you hear devs talking about is hey I can buy something to quickly stand up but let's take this out of the theoretical will yeah sure okay I'm going to go make okay TM out of the theoretical this is a theoretical but right screw it but like we're going to we're going to create a more concrete example as a use case I'm going to go make a slay the spire kind game, but instead of doing 2D, I'm going to do it in 3D. And we're going to do we're gonna change our art style, and I want to go make this as a one to two person team, and I don't want to take eight years to do it. Sure.

I've saved up five grand. Let's go shopping. Okay. This is basically I'm going to try and take what would be a six-year project and turn it into a two-year project. Okay, that's by spending $5,000. Okay. So, starting with that. So, this is a So, so just so everyone's on the same page, this is a turnbased card engine adventure rogike that involves we're doing in 3D instead of 2D. In 3D instead of 2D. Excellent. All right, let's let's take a look around. Okay, here. Let me go up here. I did some favorites just for this. Um, real unity asset store. You're going to make me do this. Check this out. Okay, here's the very first thing I Oh, it goes on a flash sale in 20 days. That's what Oh, hold on. Oh, that's the CCG kit. Here we go. Here's

my first $99, right? I'm going to go buy a rogike game engine. Somebody has gone out there and made a generic rogike slay the spire style engine. I don't like the art style. No disrespect to the person who put it together, but for $80, excuse me, $99, I can get a something that lets me see cards, see monsters, select targets, generate a map, get cards with assets, is universal is works with the built-in in the URP engine. Okay, here we go. features, card battles, generate an adventure map, solo and co-op, desktop and mobile controls. Actually, I don't have to read these all out. Yeah. So, for a hundred bucks, I can go look at the code somebody's written for this and use this to read through it and as I'm reting myself Unity, have a commented

guide on how to build all of these with examples that work. Yeah. So, um that seems like a pretty good $100. It does. Right. This this feels like a way um it it feels like in many ways uh the as someone who worked in IT for a really long time, right? You almost never need to make your own solution. Someone else has made the solution. Your job is not to make the solution, it's to find the solution, right? And then adapt it to your use case. So here, if all Jeff uses is the underlying structure of the game and then tweaks it from there in a bunch of ways, that's worth that's well worth a hundred bucks because this takes you from I would like to build this kind of game to I would like to make here's an example of a game that works with code, right? Yeah. Here here's an example of this. It sort of um gets you into the range of building a minimum uh viable

product rather than starting from zero. Right? It's sort of the um in order to bake a cake from scratch, you must first invent the universe. We have now invented the universe. Let us proceed to bake the cake. Sort of. I don't have to go grow the wheat to grind into the flour. Correct. I'm starting with prepackaged flour and going off to actually build my cake. Yeah. Okay, cool. So that's that's a hundred bucks. We have 4,900 left to go. Yeah. And by the way, I was just looking like at a couple of these. Like Indie Mark, who makes this um has also done. Are we not going back? Oh, I have it here. Um he's also done a CCG one. Oh, no. Right. That was Game Vanilla. Yeah. Who did the CC? I think Game Hold on. It's funny. You actually start to recognize some of these groups. Come here, Game Vanilla. What have you done? CCG kit, single player, CCG kit,

gooey pack. They've done a generic bubble shooter, a generic match three with swipes, generic Candy Crush. Like different groups have actually gone out there. Maybe we Oh, I think it was this CCG kit that I actually thought was Let's go look at this one versus Indie Marks one. Oh, this one's only the built-in pipeline, not the universal render pipeline. But again, you might buy these just for the code, right? Yeah. It's also really nice that because it's all consolidated in one place, right? You're not God. Okay, so streamers, right? My experience with buying assets is is in Streamland. Streamers buy assets off Etsy. This is so much better than that, right? This is so much better than that because you have guarantees of what it works with and that it's been tested and that like it's a genuine product and

that like Unity vouches for it, right? Yeah. And I think that um Brain's distinction is a good one, right? That um there are you can definitely see how someone would like essentially say, "Ah, yes, I'm going to take this bubble shooter kit and replace buy a couple of assets and buy like five bucks worth of assets." flip some logos around and then call that my game, right? Versus I have a thing and I'm gonna transform it, right? It's the degree of versus my 50page design doc that I've already put together and two years of thought on how I want to make all of this. Yeah, exactly. But it's still like it is amazing to me and it's amazing how far the store has come. back in 2016 and 17 when 15 man when I was um doing some development work for VR for u the early Oculus ecosystem um Oculus didn't have avatars yet so we

had to go make our own avatars for use in VR and we were doing tabletop games and one of the things we opted on to do was masks became our avatars So, we had one of our artists putting together these really cool masks and they mapped your body movement. So, as you moved around, you could see it and you'd see their hands move as well because you used the hand things. And a mask would take roughly 2 to three days to make a good mask. And at that point, we also went under the Unity store and for another 50 bucks picked up three, I think it was three more masks. And so, we saved nine days of artist time. Um, which considering we only had a couple of artists and we had a deadline to get this game out was great. I'd also wanted to put in that when you won a game, so I mean you like we were playing Katon. We had the license for Katon. So we're all sitting around the table playing VR Katon that when you won the game I wanted little fireworks to come up and like explode over the board at right

just over eye level. We didn't have a great VFX artist on staff. for 20 bucks. I found a a firework package on the early Unity store. We bought it. It took Paul an hour to implement it and it was beautiful. Somebody had made a little fireworks package and after every game little fireworks you and they just explode over the table and it was so pretty and everybody remembers that it was 20 bucks. Like these are the kinds of things that even a financed team like oh we don't have a specialist at this. pay somebody who was a specialist who put this together to make money on their side hustle. Yep. And it was great. And even if even if you couldn't have found exactly what you were looking for, you know, nowadays it feels like that's likely, it does feel likely that you could have said, "Hey, uh, I noticed that you have this thing that's kind of like what I'm looking for. Would you do a commission for this thing?" Right. Um,

oh, I am sure that half the people up here make a sizable amount of their money off of commissions. Yeah. You put out these low poly art packs. I need these five models that aren't in there. Could you make them for me? Mhm. And there's probably a deal where like if you they'll cut you a break if they if they can put them in the asset packs afterwards or you can pay more for exclusives or whatever, right? But I do think that it this is a really cool indication of how it feel not like leveling the playing field but like it definitely feels like a big step up on hey you want to get started. It takes the getting started from I have no idea where to start to I have an idea of where to start and I need this amount of money to do it which is very nice right because starting is usually one of the hardest parts. Finishing also one of the hardest parts. The starting is very hard. Well, we've talked about art. Yeah. Well, let's go look at some other things for a moment. Sure. Here we go. I'm going to open up

this one, this one, and um this one. So, Will, you know what I don't want to build for my game? What? I don't want to build a game launcher. I don't want to build a little thing that pops up at the beginning. I'm not going to have one for my game anyway because it launches out of Unity. But you know those one, you know, the launchers that pop up, like the League of Legends launcher or the others, for 250 bucks, you can buy one that'll um basically do binary patch differences, give you news, repairs, self updates, multi- language support, set your resolutions. Um, easy to, you know, animated, customizable, well documented. 250 bucks. I don't have to go buy a game launcher or excuse me, build a game launcher. I can buy a game launcher code and hook it up and here's one with 285 people looking at it, five star reviews. Like, yeah, that's that is great. I

don't want to build a game launcher, right? You know what else I don't want to build? I don't want to build a save system. I don't know how to do serialized saves that store in the cloud. Um, for 50 49 bucks, 1,000 people have five starred this system. There's a whole bunch of things like that you may be interested in building a game that have and this has nothing to do with art. This isn't I'm going to go buy some models. This is I'm buying a game launcher. I'm buying a solution that tells me how to do game data and serialized saves. Yeah. Like that's pretty cool. Yeah. Check this out. Oh, go ahead. I I think that that's that that like game launcher save system, right? Especially because like saving to the Steam cloud isn't new, right? That's not a new thing. But you don't want to have to implement why why would you bother implementing a new

version of that? Just find a solution that does that thing. It's not new, right? Yeah. Look at this. Let's see. This was used by Do they say here? Oh, here we go. This is the text animator used by Little Kitty, Big City, Paper Trail, like Cult of the Lamb. This lets you hold on come in and basically with typing something the equivalent of HTML code in your dialogue, make it start to do the wiggles and the booms and all of the other little fun things. I could learn how to go program this from scratch, but for $65, I can come in and use the system that several other fantastic lowbudget to mid-budget games have used to come do custom effects in my text, right? Like I saw this, this was one of the first things I

saw and I immediately put it on my save for like the real game I'm going to build. I am buying this asset. Yeah. Okay. So, so by the way, so right now, just so we're like I'm I'm keeping kind of mental mental math track. So, we've got $100 for what we'll call the like foundation of the game, right? We've got 250 bucks. Oh, we don't need a launcher, but we do. Yeah, we don't need a launcher. If I needed If I had a game with that needed a launcher, Yeah. I would spend 250 bucks to buy it any day of the week, right? Like that is weeks to months worth of programming hell for something that people want to just work. Yeah. Nobody tells you how good your game launcher was. Yeah. But people will tell you if it's bad. That is one of the downsides, right? like you do need to make sure that this is meeting the needs that you have and that it's doing the thing that you want it to do because oh people will tell you if it's bad but like you know uh and then we're at like 105 $115 for like a save system and a text

animator and a foundation for a game like right there right and just those three things alone would let me start on that game have beautiful text on it and have basically all my saves on. Yeah. And those I mean I'd still have to read through them and learn how to implement them. Sure. But the mental load that you save on those things is also significant, right? It's not just like particularly as you've said, you're not a programmer by trade, right? You have the design for the game, not the program for the game in mind. And so you get to save all the mental load of training yourself to be a programmer, right? You don't you don't have to do that. like you have to figure out how to implement it and that is some amount of programming but it's very different than invent the universe right um let me show you a couple more fun things you talk about settings all the time you know how accessibility and settings yes this is a by default by

here that just it is a game setting system that hooks into all of your other hooks and lets you adjust everything from display to graphics to edits to controls and um like they've laid it all out. They've put in all the hooks, different times of volume, everything else. Yeah. And those things, by the way, that's really important for the industry because if you make it easy to do things like accessibility settings, more people will do them. And I am a huge 50ucks. Yeah. Right. I am a huge believer that every game needs good accessibility settings. In fact, the game that we're playing tomorrow south of midnight uh which just came out already earned massive points. I was setting up uh the game to make sure it ran and captured okay and all that before this stream and it opens with, "Hey, would you like all of the menus for this game narrated? How would you like your subtitles? Here are

all of your subtitle flavors and options." And I was like, "Oh, I love this game already cuz it did this correctly, right?" And I'm not I'm not a normal person when it comes to settings menus. I love a good settings menu. Um uh I think that they're one of the marks of like a well-considered game. And if you make it easy to do, more people will do it. Um I did I did we did have a really good question from chat real quick. Um because uh I think this is a really great question. Um what's the launcher for? What can't you just run the game executable straight out of Steam or whatever? like c can you explain that real quick? Usually it's only used by companies honestly that um operate outside of the um the Steam ecosystem or that want you to be able to launch multiple games from one place that isn't Steam. So, for example, League of League of Legends has it in there to patch League before you play, but also to patch Team Fight Tactics and um I'm for and um Valerant I think is in

the same launcher. Yeah. Um a lot of Civ actually used to do that um because Foraxis wanted you to see their other games and be able to run advertisements. They recently got rid of it. It used to be a more common thing that it is now. A lot of MMOs do it because they want to do basically checks on your patch before you run it, but um not well basically Steam takes care of a lot of the updating and settings for people, but companies that don't run exclusively through Steam still want to get all of that check and update done before you run. So Steam in some cases has turned us from every game has one. Excuse me, half the games have one to like 5% of the games have one. Yeah. Oh, and um that's a big one there. Let's see. If you want to have a whole bunch of mods and loadouts, some games prefer

that you do it before you load the entire game. Other games are fine with you do it basically from like your um initial landing window. Yeah. Depending upon how their game works and how their engine works. Minecraft is a prime example, right? Everybody has their favorite Minecraft loader thing, launcher, um mod downloader manager thing because they're all different, right? Yeah. Um they will Yes. 95 bucks for an industry standard dialogue system. So like branching dialogue trees and dialogue management and all that done in a visual editor so that you can basically say oh this points to this points to this here's the dead end here's here here's the branching oh I want this one to actually be up here you can drag it connect the arrow and if we go down again let's see barks you can combine it with scriptal event a bark is something like if you come near an NPC a bark is the industry term for it says a thing alert alerts,

cut scenes, cinematics, relationship, language localization, like all of this built in to a non nodebased visual editor for less than $100 that has been used by a large number of games. Again, you could build these from scratch, but in a lot of cases, why would you, right? And again, like, oh, there you go. This is showing like the trigger and interaction, like you're setting the radius around your model for when somebody steps in, a thing, a dialogue event happens. Like this may actually be for the if I'm doing a Slay the Spire game, honestly, overkill. I don't think we need this heavy of a dialogue system. Pretty text, yes. But buy a dialogue system for under $100. Yeah. And and and the really cool thing too

is the more people use the tool, the easier it is for the person making good tools to make a living making good tools, right? So instead of having a tool programmer for your game, there are now freelance tool programmers that have made the digital equivalent of wrenches, right? This is a digital wrench and they keep updating them and adding to them. Yeah. Over time. Yeah. And and I think Grass makes an excellent point here that like uh it depends on the kind of game, right? If you're doing a VN that is like a huge chunk of your game, you can write a visual novel in something in in something like that where you flow out all of the dialogue and all of the relationships and all of that in that system and that's the bulk of your game. So it really is like system dependent, right? Yeah. And again, like looking at these, this is also what's part of what's bringing game development Honestly, I would say to the masses. Yeah. And that without something like

this, if you were a really good writer who had done some game development, you couldn't make your own thing, right? With Unity and this, you're a lot closer. You can actually go they have visual novel templates in the same way as like that um CCG one I showed you. And notice, by the way, the past like six or seven things we've looked at have nothing to do with art. This isn't going and buying a model. This is what actually got me so excited looking through this like 6 months ago when I started looking was the amount of things that you could buy that had nothing to do with art that were tools and utilities, like good fun things. And we'll go through some free stuff maybe later, but like I just like some of these I'm just check this out. Hey Will, pretend instead for a moment we're going to go make a badass tower defense game and I'm going to call it Zerg Rush. Okay, here we go. Agent navigation crowds. This is 3D path. This is 3D

pathf finding for large numbers of entities. It's a plug-in solution. Yeah, that's that's wild because like path finding not easy. Mhm. Look at this. $25. Yeah. It is a pathfinding solution for crowds, right? Yeah. Oh god. I I So, that's Yeah, that's a ton. Look. Okay. You know what this is making me think of? Um when Weda had to build a battle animation system for Lord of the Rings. And here it is for 25 bucks, right? Because essentially that was just a complex pathfinding model, right? where the two armies would like find each other and interact and then there was like a kind of a script for like when someone would die, right? Um and even they screwed it up. They admitted that like offshot there were enemies who couldn't pathf find to each other that were just running away from the battle in opposite directions and here's a

solution for 25 bucks. Like I saw this and like you know how you get inspiration from seeing this made me almost want to go make like a Zerg Rush tower defense game. Like what could I do with something that let me do funneling other thing with large amounts of people in funnels? Like this is cool. This is so cool. Yeah, it's it it is a really cool um Yeah, like here we go. This is art for a moment. Cloth animation. There's a $35 solution to animating cloth on your models. Cloth is hard to animate, by the way. Yeah. Uh especially I don't know if you all have noticed but cloth is like cloth and hair are like the two things that always clip they clip into everything all of the time forever in every game engine in every game. They just do right and this is this is I'm seeing minimal clipping here and this looks really good and it's 35 bucks. Right. Yeah. Like and again

it's just the sheer breadth of things on the Unity store. if you just start browsing through. Like I'm not a Unity store expert. I've looked around for a while, but these were just like fun like um Oh, check out like actually we don't even need to go look at more art assets. There's cool art assets. There's cool VFX like yeah, you know, stylized projectables. Ultimate VF actually ultimate VFX bundle like this is these are VFX, you know, little pops, little arrows, explosions, outlines, slashes. This is a collection of Oh, here we go. eight different bundles of VFX. And it's just like looking through it, it is mindblowing what you can get. And again, this is fairly expensive, but for $160, this might be your entire solution

for a game if you're making a small game, like a two to three person game like I'm thinking. And it is very interesting um that this is one of the things that recommends Unity as the engine that you choose, right? Like in addition to the other like you're going to need to pick an engine when you build your game, right? You got three major choices, two really major choices and one that's kind of like sitting in the back going, "I'm also here. I'm here. Look at me." Um that one in the back is good, right? Uh and then you've got uh the the two the two big contenders which are Unreal and and Unity as we said before. And this is a thing that recommends Unity, right? is that's like enough. That's enough VFX for like a mobile. Like you could do a whole flipping through like look at that. Yeah. Like that's nice. Like that'll do. That's way better than I can build. Um Oh, hold on. I got to show you. Like as long as we're talking about cool

stuff. Let's see. MeshBaker. Um uh by the way, um uh Mr. Omega over in YouTube chat said if you like text animator you should look at feel. Um and this feel's on my list. I'm coming to it. I'm coming to it. Um thank you. I also think that this is a um that this is another big useful thing, right? Which is if you know other devs and if you're deving in Unity, you probably know other Unity devs. Um you will have [Music] a it's much easier for people to recommend things and to say like, "Hey, I got this thing from a reputable place. Here are the reviews. Here's the thing. you should add it to your system because I know that it works with yours even though you're developing a tower defense game and I'm developing a third person shooter. Right? So, here's the thing you almost never hear anybody talk about in who isn't hard into dev mesh making. It's basically um meshes and materials are all over

every 3D object you see and they all get rendered. A mesh baker basically takes them and combines them in ways that it's processed so that it is less intensive um on how many what's called batches it runs to process this. So here's an example. We're looking out at an asteroid field. Before this was optimized it was calling 5,924 batches. With a match baker it's calling 40. That seems basically less than 1%. That seems significant. Yeah. So, basically, it's an optimizer for meshes, which is something nobody knows exists until they get that awful frame rate, and they're trying to figure out why. And here you go. Here's the solution that's been used by or bought over five starred over 427 times. Yep. Like, and is on over 7,000 people's watch list. Because what usually when you're watching it, you're interested in an asset, but you might

not need it yet, right? or you're waiting for a sale because those also happen. Yeah. Well, like um Microslat puts together, speaking of meshes, terrains and meshes. So like tracks in snow, wheel tracks on dirt. Welcome, Will, to basically Yeah. like you're not when you see tracks go in dirt like when you're watching um Red Dead Redemption and you see looking they're not actually carving 3D divots into the ground. They're putting textures or decals on top of it that mesh in with the dirt mesh that together make it look like it's leaving tracks. Right. It does. If you actually had to put 3D indents into it, the rendering would be crazy, right? Yeah. You're not, you don't actually change the terrain mesh. You're just changing

what it looks like. So, here is a solution that gets you a frigin ton of stuff. Again, a lot of these are getting into the weeds that most people don't even know they exist. But these are solutions in this case you that just you can buy and work, right? and and and and these are things that like top end games are used, right? Wait, hold on a sec. Wait, wait. This is visual scripting from Hearthstone, Inside, Hollow Knight, First Tree, Observation, Dreamfall, Chapters, and more. Okay, great. Yeah, this isn't just small studios that use these. Um, and again, visual scripting is like, let's see if we can find Okay. Oh, here we go. Made with Playmaker. This is one of the ones that I was realiz like everybody buys, right? And it basically lets you set up a visual script is instead of all programming code, you put little blocks like door

trigger. It starts closed. When you trigger the thing, the door opens. Each of these then point to a little line of code, but it lets you reuse these blocks. And visually, you might even have an a programmer put it together and then hand off the set of tools to all of for example the level builders who can then go and visually script doors and windows and all of these other things that get event and triggered. This is one of the things that bridges the gap between hardcore crunchy programmers who are like ah yes I dream in C++ and uh people who are like I have a great idea for a game but I don't know how to make the computer box do the thing. Right? This is this is a tool, right? It's just a tool like any other. And I I love that it's I So, Jee, are there lists? Are there like lists of of um like centralized lists of things? Cuz I feel like there should be a list of like here's all of the Unity asset source stuff. This is the gold standard start your Unity game thing. Here are all of these things. I don't know. Let me show

you one more. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then I want to get to that. So, somebody had mentioned feel. Yeah, feel is basically they call it adding juice to your game. This is a collection of card little bumps. This is ground shakes. This is motion blurs. This is all of the extra little stuff like look on the left and right. Left is un, right is with. Yeah. that let you come in and like add that little bit of well actually let's just so you can see they're going a bit into the code but like the things that make those go back a little bit the little bump and the little that happens around there the screen shakes it's a whole package that just let you add small amounts of polish to everything that happens this is something that some games don't even know to put in here for 50 bucks is a package

of a whole bunch of them that just let you add it. Yeah. So, in our mythical, you know, rogike, you play a card and you want a little thud or you want the card to shift and Twitter a little bit or upon a big hit, you want a small screen shake or you want, you know, a little kind of camera blur whoo in like these all come in for all of the render pipelines. Oh, here we go. winner of best artist tools for 21 and publisher of the year for 23 of just extra little things to polish up your game all in one package. Yeah. So, I I want to back up real quick just for a second because you you brought this up a cool a bunch a few times now, right, with with a couple others about like this is a thing that most people don't know that they need, right, or that they want, right? They don't know that they want it yet. And what I think is kind of cool as a tool for aspiring um designers, developers, programmers, whatever, is not only is this a place where you can get the stuff, it's a

place where you can find out the stuff exists, right? Which is huge because not knowing what you don't know is a weird huge philosophical learning gap, right? And this is a way to expose your brain. As a dev with 20 plus years experience, I am learning things in here, right? just looking through like of course I was thinking of saves for my game. I hadn't thought of a save system. I'd kind of naively assume that maybe Unity had that in. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. But the fact that somebody's made a third party system means that there's room for improvement. Yeah. Um we have a question from male. Uh while this is a Unity focus episode, even as a Unreal Engine indie dev, I'm taking notes. Will any of the storefront platform differences matter? Um so Unreal absolutely has their own store as well. I happen to be operating in the Unity ecosystem. So, I've been checking out Unity. I do know that Unreal has it. I believe some of these assets it wouldn't matter like if you're buying, you know,

if you went and you bought that CCG engine, the code on the back end that runs it, which is probably written in C or Python, it's going to work no matter where you put it. As long as it's something that can run those, it's going to work. it won't necessarily have all the hooks. So, and and I think the core concept applies of there are tools that are available that you can purchase that will improve your game significantly um by trading a little money for a lot of time. Uh that principle, that core idea will also carry through I think uh for sure. And part of it's your goal like my goal if I make a game will I want something good enough that when people play it they're like this is a great game. Sure. And there's a big difference between a passion project and that like if you play it and you're like you want people say this is a great game. Your saves have to work. You need those extra bits of polish. You know, you need all of the stuff working because the bar is

so high now for what people expect from an experience, right? Like this is still on field. Look at this here. Like post-processing depth of field or lens distortion or color grading. Like this is just 50 bucks. Once you get the package, like you could probably retune your entire game just off of this to have a better UX user experience just with this package. And it might be a thing that you did. You spent 50 bucks and then spent an entire week going through your game just taking it and trying to up the feel everywhere that you want it to be. Yeah. And this it is kind of an interesting like double-edged sword here, right? Because on the one hand, there are more um there are more games than ever that are coming out every year. Unfortunately, that also means that there are more games than ever that come out every year that get ignored, right? Because I unfortunately in 2025 have the same amount of time to

play games more or less that I did in 2020 when there were far fewer games coming out than there were in 2015 when there were fewer games than there were in 2010 when there were fewer games. Right? So, um, the water level for getting noticed feels much higher. Um, by the way, look at this one. Yeah. It's a tool that let you basically run a database out of Google Sheets or Excel and syncs it into your game. Okay, that's it's cool, but please don't please don't if you're building a CCG Yeah, for sure. I mean, a rogue like CCG that has, you know, a 100 powers, you might as someone who is currently dealing with the spaghetti code written in it, if you're use, if you're building an MMO, don't Oh, yeah. Just don't 14. That is the difference in scale. Yeah. 14's back end is written in Excel sheets. Excel is not a database grass. Yes, I know that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I just like some of these things I look at and I'm just like, this is cool. Yeah.

And this isn't even getting to all of the free stuff out there. Mhm. And it like this is I think one of the biggest strengths of Unity. Not just that it is a good game engine, but the sheer amount of things that you can get for free or buy for I'm going to call it low cost because even you know even a $120 package if that say you know if that gives you half a man years worth of work. Yes. Hell if that gives you a month's worth of work from one person. Yep. That is a huge trade-off assuming you don't have unlimited time like and let's just unpack that real quick. In gamedev, you have a finite amount of money to pay people and when that money runs out, you are out of time. So your time is kind of like you the how long

you can drive your car is dictated by the gas in your tank, right? So if you get further towards your project by spending money on assets instead of the time it takes to make those assets, you're still spending money for time, but you're spending it more efficiently, which means that your team can make a better product overall, right? That you have more time for the parts that your team is really good at. Yes. Yeah. You can you can make your game shine uh in the right way. Um yeah, like we did have we did have a quick question which is does GDAU have anything like this? Um I believe Odinir is talking about it in um in chat a little bit. There is a GDO asset library. It's serviceable, but a reminder GDO is new on the scene, low adoption rate, right? And um people are still like figuring out if they want to switch to it, how they're going to switch to it. Right? That's nothing against GDAU. It's just a factual analysis that GDAU is the new kid on the block. And while I know a lot of people are really excited about it, this is sort of one of Unity's big benefits of

having been here for forever is that they have this, right? And again, like this, as I said, I think is one of Unity's killer features at this point is that they have a vibrant third party community making things for people who build in Unity. Yeah. And that whole economy of creators helping other creators is really cool. Yeah, just straight up. Yeah, I I think that that is Yeah, it's really neat. This is, by the way, not un not dissimilar to mod communities except people are paying for it. Mod communities do this all the time. So, if you're familiar with the way that mod communities, like mod packs in Minecraft, are made up of like hundreds of mods, each of which is maintained by a different mod author, and which are designed to work together to some extent, greater or lesser, in different versions of Minecraft, right? And you can make a mod pack, a finished

product, a program by putting together a bunch of those and then using your knowhow to make all of them work together to tell the story or to give the gameplay experience that you want, right? And that's actually one of my goals long term is I think my first game build project I would like to be a Minecraft mod pack because that's a system that I'm reasonably familiar with and I'm familiar with all of the different parts of it. Um and I think that would be cool. By the way, well what I'm showing here 125 bucks you can buy a system that lets you model in the Unity engine as opposed to like building things in Blender or other places. You can actually mod in the engine. Excuse me. build models in the engine while looking at how it will actually look. So you don't have to import that. You could still import stuff from Blender, but you don't have to, right? Or you can import something in and then continue to mod it. Yeah. Although I'm I'm probably going to say, and this might be a tiny bit of heresy. Um, this is cool and

great. You should probably also learn Blender. Probably what, sir? You should probably also learn Blender. Uh, it's just like, yeah, I've been impressed with the sheer variety of things as I've been looking through the Unity store, right? And I think not in a bad way, right, or in a dismissive way, a lot of these solutions are good enough, right? You don't need your CCG to have best-in-class ray tracing. probably I'm going to go out on a limb and say that your CCG doesn't need world class ray tracing. It needs something to make the graphics pop. Great feel does that right? Is it the best thing in the world to do that? No. But is it good enough? Yes, it's absolutely good enough. And that's a very good bar to meet when you're building a game, right? Um but my foils need ray tracing. Listen, listen nerds. I like shiny cards as much as

everyone else does. You don't need to ray trace the foils. I'm sorry. Yeah. Um, let's see. You were asking about lists. Yeah. So, like this here, Unity Unity has some pretty cool things. Like this is top selling assets. I was just kind of looking at sort by popularity. And then you can do all sorts of things like you can be like, "Hey, you know, I want top selling assets that are free." Mhm. actually. Oh, this is this is another uh this is another very uh interesting one that uh Leil Lumis uh brings up and I think this is really great. Um Nope, not that this text move. I really like that the Unreal store because they give out free stuff every month and so much of it is useful. That's good too, right? Unity has and that's in keeping with Epic style, right? Epic is very used to paying out the nose for user acquisition. Unity pays or not Unity um Epic pays money

every month to devs and tool creators and everything else to try and get people into their ecosystem, right? The the cookie is like yes, you get a free game, make an account, install the launcher. Yes, there's this free asset. Will you use Unreal Engine for your game now? Yes. Right. Um, and that's not a bad thing, but it is worth uh noting that you have an opportunity as a developer, an aspiring developer maybe to profit off of that, right? To profit off of the the way that they do business, right? It behooves you to at least get them. Just get them. Even if you don't use them, you have them for when you might need them, and it costs you nothing but a couple minutes. Um, yeah, just looking at a weather, lighting, and water and space solution. But again, just some of the stuff you look at here, you're like, cool, dynamic clouds and weather, like that seems fun. Mhm. And one of the

neat parts for a lot of these is that they're very modifiable. Yes. Oh, okay. So, this is a bundle that just gives you everything else this group has done. But, you know, like if you're looking at the weather there, say I am and I'm going to go design this in an outerorldly fantasy thing, maybe I retint it. I guarantee you there's a couple of sliders in there that I can make my, you know, I can make my storm clouds pink or purple, right? Or, you know, change the density of the clouds or the frequency of the lightning strikes. Yeah. or I can make it move five times faster. So, it gives you that in the cinema effect of like the clouds racing by. Like, so as a designer, I look at a whole bunch of these and like, oh, it's a tool I could use. What could I then do with it to make, you know, to make it mine in the system that I run? Yeah. I I think that this is um it feels like this is a whole world of starting points, right? that that like you have

to start from all angles at the finished product which is a game right and this is giving you so many starting points I've seen so many like just in the things that are going through right there's water physics there's crowd physics there's clouds there's envir volutric fog I I'm going to get a I'm going to buy a volutric fog solution I want the 3D Yeah look at that I don't know if it's going to be this It might be like and again these are just things that I could go learn how to program all of these but you know with a five grand budget and again that's just picking an arbitrary number which is the cost of a a junior engineer for one month for five grand if I've saved up I can go buy enough stuff to make a one to three person team look like they are probably a 10 to 15 person team, right? Which may

not seem like a lot, but that is the difference between Mega Crit and um well, they're bigger than that. Super Giant used to be that small. Super Giant's bigger than that now. Thanks, Hades. What was the Hades team? Hades team was I want to say in the 20s. Chat, double check me. How many people made Hades? I guarantee you all of the teams like that were coming over here like we just saw like that the dialogue system or whatever used by Little Kitty and all of those other ones. Yeah. Or the what was it? There was a visual scripting system that we saw been used by Hearthstone and like Hollow Knight and everything else. Yeah. Like there are just solutions out there that people are like why would I go recreate this from scratch? And there is a place where this has been the industry standard for um openly the industry standard in an acknowledged way for a really long time and that's music. You probably don't need a staff composer. You probably need to license a or you need to commission a

composer to make a soundtrack, right? Probably for most games that we're talking about in this sphere, right? Small team, small budget games, right? You're not going to have a composer on staff. probably if one of your programmers, you know, composes on the side, then great. But for a really long time, they have brought in additional people to do music specifically because it's art, right? It's a different kind of art. Um, and so this feels like that, right? Whoa. Um, no, Brass, I'm not saying I always see weird things. I'm like, what's this one? This is a little bloodier than I wanted. Motion warping. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, it's it's 750. Yeah. Um to be clear, by the way, um to answer Brston's point, I am not saying that they uh that Super Giant used Unity. I am mentioning the size of the team and what they could accomplish. Right. Mega Crit, the studio that made um Slay the Spire is two

people. Two. Hollow Night. But they also worked for what, six years? Correct. A very long time. Hollow Knight was three and they had Kickstarter money and they made the when you have a threeperson team and we're going to talk about this in the upcoming future. Kickstarter kind of a trap in a lot of ways. Um but with a threeperson team, Kickstarter money will get you to the point where you can release your game, right? Versus something like Super Giant and making Hades a much bigger team capable of much bigger things, right? Because in the indie space, right, we kind of all have a sense of this is a AAA title. It's from EA, Ubisoft, uh, you know, whoever, right? It's a big game. It's a first party Nintendo title. It's a whatever. There are a 100 plus people working on it, right? When we get down to the indie space, it's a little harder to see the gradations between what the budget and what the size of the game was. So, I usually when I'm thinking about it and talking about it on stream,

I normally go and look at how many people made the game because that's generally an indication of how long how deeply some things were messed with, right? Because Hollow Knight, while I love it to bits forever and will be losing many hours of sleep when Silkong comes out, is a relatively simple game. Relatively simple, right? Mhm. Um, and uh, so I need to stop looking like every time I look in the Unity store, I find new things. Yeah. Which is one of its strengths and I get new inspiration of for the game I'm building. Is this a tool that I could bring in and do it. Yeah. And I want to be very clear. I'm not trying to sound cavalier about even a a sum like five grand, but in the in the large in the scheme of things, if you have a 10 person team and let's say the average salary is let's call it $75,000 and this may be for all the way

up to senior people down to junior and I'm picking a random number. It could be higher or lower. 10person team for $75,000 is $750,000 a year. So if you're doing a three-year development, that's $2.25 million that you're spending just on people for three years of game development. Like game development, the single most expensive thing is your people. Hands down. That is a 10p person team. You know, if you're looking at Rockstar with a thousand people for six years making GTA, they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars just on their people for it. And so that's why when I look at things like this, you know, five grand to go buy man years worth of time might be the difference between that $2.25 25

million for people getting their game out on time or not. And you know that's all money that if you do profit sharing or royalties for your studio, all of the money you spend has to be recouped before anybody gets profit sharing or royalties. So, in a lot of cases too, the pe for the people working on the game, ways that you can add more money in or excuse me, add more time in or make your game better directly benefit all of the people working on the game because it makes it faster for them to actually get a bonus. Yep. And that's great. Like I've been on games that have done well and gotten bonuses. Like everybody's really happy when that happens. and your whole team is pretty much aligned on the oh, we can save a little bit of money here and buy something that keeps us from having to do it and lets us go make more game or better game. Like that is almost always a from game developers that two thumbs up would repeat. Yes, please. Right. I feel like I if if if I were uh in charge of running a studio, there would be a floating line budget

item in the monthly budget for Unity store for uh you know asset store purchases for our engine, right? It's just in the budget. We just already put it in the budget. It's already there. If we don't use it, great. We'll roll it to next month, but it's there in case we need it kind of thing because it's efficiency, right? Yeah. Um, we had a standing order that anything under X anybody could just buy if it sped them up in any in any reasonable way. Yeah. And it wasn't even that high. I think it was like 50 bucks. But it was just like, don't bother us if it's less than $50 and it speeds you up. Yes. Just do it. Um, and then put in the repository because you buy it for the company and then other people can use it too. Yeah. Uh so uh I want to bring up a question because it's incredibly salient both to the topic that we're talking about and to a future topic uh which is Darkwolf asks, "Have we done a design club about funding game development?" I'd like to see something about that with a deep dive into Kickstarter pros and cons or some such.

It's it's been years. We could do it again. It is remarkable that you mentioned that because we were talking about maybe doing something like that soon because and this is one of the interesting things. It keeps changing a little bit. Not a ton, but a little bit. And I think it is worth a revisit. So we will absolutely be putting that um in light of this talk about like how you actually get the money to or how you use the money, right? Let's back up a step. How are you going to get the money um to spend on UD assets, right? Yeah. Yeah. Actually really fun question here too. So this is a thing actually to think about a little bit. When is an item in the store not worth the money? Yeah. So, one of the downsides to buying systems, not necessarily assets, but systems, like say you went and bought that save system, and then Unity went and changed some underlying part of the store. say they went or not story they're um they go from Unity 6 to Unity 7 so years from now there is a chance

that some of the architecture they change might make it so that some of the plug-in or excuse me so that existing code has to be modified to continue to work in Unity 7. So if you are upgrading from Unity 6 to Unity 7 for your development there will be some things that you have to fix. That's just how it works. For every plugin you have that you didn't write the code, that is a thing that could potentially break that you don't know how to fix. And if the if it is a long-term developer on the Unity store like and they gets upgraded to Unity 7, I guarantee you if that person is still selling that save bundle, they're going to go upgrade that because they want to keep selling that save bundle and they want everybody who bought it to be able to keep using it. Mhm. If you buy something where basically the dev's like, "Cool," and it's deprecated and

they head off and no longer support it, there is a chance that that at some point becomes obsolete code. That phenomena happens all of the time in the streaming space. We have every time OBS updates a major version, we get a bunch of cool new stuff, right? When I started streaming, back in Mayday, OBS didn't have undo. Undo is a recent innovation to OBS. Okay? So like OBS version updates, great, amazing. More of them, please. More things like undo, huh, but they break things that are no longer maintained. And we lose we get new stuff, but we lose stuff every time there's a major update. So, it's always important to update, especially because Twitch kind of expects and YouTube both expect that you're running like the current version of OBS. Um, but there are problems, right, with with breaking things. Um, I also think that this is a a great one from Ryan Fox. I frequently run into the issue of an asset looking great for 90% of what you want, but then you run into the last 10% and have to

decide whether to replace it or try to reach out for more. Yeah. Nothing is going to be a perfect fit, right? And so it that's why people hire the actual person, the programmer, artist or designer to come work on the team because then you get to say, "Wait, wait, go fix that last bit, please." Yeah. Um, and I think that that but still you're getting 90%. Correct. It's a trade-off, right? Is a question of whether that last 10% is a sticking point for you, right? Is is that last 10% a dealbreaker, right? Because for some things it might be and for some things it might not. This low poly package has 90% of the things that we want and we're willing to commission the last 10%. Is very different than um this save system does 90% of the things that we want but doesn't have a core functionality that we need for something that we're trying to do with the game. That might be a deal breaker, right? So there's a huge variance in what that last 10% means to your game or

to your project. And in some cases, again, this is a learning opportunity. Like half of when I do this, half of the stuff I buy will probably get taken apart, put back together, and modded to hell. And half of it I'll probably just be like, "Cool. All of it I'm going to have to learn how to use." Like, just because you buy a thing, you then still have to plug it in and then take the controls it gives you and hook those controls up into things actually with your game. Mine a dynamic weather system means you own a dynamic weather system. It doesn't put any dynamic weather in your game until you go learn how to use the system, put it in, and then adjust all the variables and tweak all the things that you want to make it actually work, right? And that's a lot, right? That that can be that is a lot in itself because you're trading learning how to make the thing or learning how to configure the thing, which is generally easier, but still work and still learning and still practice. Yeah. And it all takes time.

But again, you are just you're like my goal out of this would be honestly to come out with a higher caliber of thing with either a single person or a very small team than I could otherwise do. Mhm. And I'm at the point in my life where I'm willing to trade a little bit of money for a higherend product because if I make a thing, I want it to be good and I want people to play and be like, "That's a badass game." Yeah. you you have thrown out I'm gonna make a garbage game as part of a game jam thing and see what everyone thinks of my garbage game phase. Uh which is by the way a legitimate phase. Nothing wrong with that phase. That phase is great and I love it and I love people's garbage games that they made to see if they could do a thing because sometimes they end up being amazing. Right. Uh, your regular schedule reminder, Local Funk didn't think Bolatra was good or that it was going to sell very many copies by his own admission. Whoops.

Not a whoops. It's Yeah. So, Oh, they do have a best essential assets though. I'm a little curious. By the way, anything grayed out means I already own it, which means it was free. free. And as I was going through, just looking at things like that seems pretty good for free. Yeah, I definitely think free, like if you're if you're looking at starting a thing, starting in the free section and just grabbing stuff that looks vaguely right and then playing with it, uh is probably a good place to start. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Jeeoff, as as much as I would love to let you roam free in the wilds of uh of this uh all day, I think this is probably a good place to to wrap up our conversation on this. U you see why you're so excited just on like Yes. as a developer, as somebody who puts things together like just looking at this and being like, "Wow, I could build so much more than I other than I was initially

thinking I would be able to," right? Is a really exciting process. or just mindset too, right? And and I think the the taking the I think that's a really big one, right? Making this approachable, making this um an affordable way to get the things that you need is is really great. And as we've talked about throughout the episode, this is not unique to Unity, though. Unity probably has the best store. Unity does have the best store currently. It's not even close. You can say that. I can't say that. I Unity has the best store, right? Um, but there are other solutions like this for whatever engine you're working in. Um, they may not be as good, but they do exist and you should know what they are, right? This is also kind of a reminder to check your resources, not just to see what resources are available to you, but to see what resources exist, right? Because again, Jeff was bringing it up repeatedly, one of the big strengths of this is you get to look through a big list of gamedev stuff and think about things why someone would use that,

right? Oh, I didn't even think about feel for making my game pop more, to add more juice, right, as they say. Until I stumbled on that, I hadn't even realized somebody might put together a kit that did that. And as soon as I saw it, I was like, "This will be one of the things I buy." Yeah, exactly. And I think I think that will Yeah. Yeah. It's a great thought exercise, too. We we do this um occasionally on the channel when we're going game shopping when we're we'll we'll end up like going down the rabbit hole of like, "Oh, this game looks kind of interesting." And then it recommends this game and then it recommends that game and now I'm looking at like some obscure title from 10 years ago that I've never heard of before that's played by like 12 people, but all of them swear it's the best game they've ever played and it's a buck 50. And you're like, "Sure, I got a buck 50 like whatever." Right? um that phenomena with with stores and with places where gamers and programmers and devs congregate is is a very powerful one. The other thing I actually hadn't really realized that I think is a great closing one is how ubiquitous this has become. Like looking at some of those big tools and the this

was used in you know big list of games you've heard of makes me realize that this isn't even just this is what indies do like this is what Blizzard does. This is like this is there are certain things that just this is what you go by. Absolutely. And they actually I was the other big one too is Unity licenses like looking through they will show you the license actually. Will can you bring it back up real quick? Uh yes I can do that real quick. Let's um let me just find one real quick. Let's go look at the text animator. So if I look at this real quick, like so standard Unity license and it's an extension asset, which means one license is required for each individual user. So they tell you straight up front for people using this what your license covers and the type of license it is. So as you're buying, it is right there. I'm a big fan of uh

transparency when it benefits the consumer. Right? Just here. This is exactly what it is. There's no hidden terms. There's no this is the license. Here it is. Please enjoy. But this is also how some people can make this work. Like if Blizzard went and bought this, you might be like, "Wow, Blizzard's cutting corners." But the guy who made this, there's probably going to be 20 people a Blizzard who in some way touch the dialogue systems. So this person just sold 20 copies of that because Blizzard's using it. And once they've coded it, it doesn't cost them any more money for each license that come to for every license they sell. This isn't a physical product. Yeah. Digital products. Cool. Like that. Yeah. 65. So they get paid. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Well, friends, that is going to do it for our show today. Thank you so much for joining us for this little deep dive shopping spree kind of thought exercise into the Unity store. Um, we will be

back next week with a game ride along. We're still figuring out which game it is. We've we've asked um Brad and Janet here to give us some uh feedback. If you have if you're a Rocky and you have feedback, you can either uh pop on over to YouTube, leave it in the YouTube comments or at one of us on Blue Sky or pop into our Discord or hop into our Discord and leave suggestions there. But we're taking suggestions for what game we do a design focus ride along for next week. Um, thank you all so very much for joining us. Final thoughts, Jeff? Um, I'm just excited we get to do this. I said the Unity score, how how far it's come since I looked through it a decade ago has really been nice. Like just looking at all the stuff and it makes me excited for a lot of, you know, small dev teams in the industry. I think that is a great place to be. All right, everybody. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. We'll see you all next time. Say bye to the people, Jeff. Bye to the people, Jeff. [Music]

I am glad we got to do that topic. As I said, I've been wanting to do that one for a while. Your your passion for that is uh is infectious. Um and I I think that that was that was really good. Let me get out of this so I can stop having a light mode window uh blast my face. Uh that would be great. Thanks. Let's see. We're not going to do any more sharing. I can close down that part. Correct. You can close that. You can close that down. Um uh yeah, thanks thanks everybody for joining. Um and you you all had some really great questions over in uh in Janet. Um thank you so much for all of those. Uh and again um here's a reminder. Uh if you are watching this uh in the YouTube VOD or wherever, hit us up with what game you'd like to see us play as a ride along um next week. Uh we've got a bunch of options. We've done a bunch of things uh before together. Um, uh, and I'd love to hear from all of you. We've done a bunch of turnbased stuff. Action stuff is a little harder because Jeff has to watch it through a

feed and comment on it while I'm piloting. Um, it also makes it harder and I'm like, wait, pause that a second because, you know, you will in the middle of a swing with something. And yeah, right. Elden Ring a little more difficult than, you know, Pokemon or whatever. Um, uh, it's funny. I was just I'm looking at the comments again. I knew there was going to be a whole bunch of people in here who were like, "Is this an interesting topic?" And then we start going and like, "Oh, yes, this is an interesting topic." I I think it is um I think it is one of those things that doesn't like when you pitch it as an idea. It's like why why would you and then you start doing it and you're like, "Oh, like genuinely Steam shopping is one of um my favorite things to do with chat here on Twitch is go through the Steam store. uh go through the Steam store, see what's on sale, see what's new, see what we've missed. Um and and see if we can um we can get something out of that. Uh I'm actually really curious now, Will, if there is a curated list of the like start here in the Unity store. If there

isn't, there should be. Now, the problem with that is that with the power to moderate that list comes a great deal of responsibility, right? because it is very easy to put things that don't deserve it on that list because people will just buy it on faith, right? So like the curation standard for the like the big you should start here list is very high, right? Like it is for Minecraft mods too. Um like there is my my core like every mod pack should have this list is very small. It's it's like JI a map. There are a handful of maps, sophisticated backpacks because I think sophisticated backpacks should be in base Minecraft, but that's just me. And like two other things and that's it, right? Um because like it's such a big responsibility to have those things be as ubiquitous as they are. Yeah. It's and there's different kinds of things too like because I don't So you

may not know this and I didn't until I learned kind of recently. There's basically three different ways of rendering in Unity. Yeah. And the assets all very clearly show which of the three or two or all three they work for. But like that alone means you might have a game or you might have something you consider universal that doesn't work for the particular render pipeline that you're using which would then just disqualify. So, there's a couple of caveats around that, but um I actually found there is a I knew somebody had built it and I found it like a week or two ago. It is a price tracker where you can go in, type in the name of assets you or on the Unity store you're interested in and it will watch it for you and tell you if any of them get a discount. Yeah. That that and then they they basically they make money because they have affiliate links on some of those. Yeah. So it won't cost you anymore, but if you use theirs and

then buy it through their link, they'll make a little bit of money off of it. And so like I have a whole bunch of stuff set up on watch list because I want to see how far I can make that. I don't know if it's I don't know if I'm really going to spend five grand, but if I'm I could easily see spending thousands of dollars instead of having to hire a person. Yeah. But, um, I want to make that amount of money go as far as it can. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, all right. I think this is where we're going to say goodbye to Janet. Janet, thank you ever so much for joining us today. Again, comment video games you want to see down in the comments. Do that thing. Um, and we will see you all. Quick shout out if you're watching this live and go to the art channel. One of our shorts just went live and is currently a number one of 10, which is Will. Ready for this one? Oh dear. Oh, wait. It's over on history, not credits. Go over to history. It's called Why Pirates Have Parrots, and it is a one minute short talking about why

pirates actually did have parrots historically. Now I have to go watch it. Um, all right, great, Janet. We'll see you all Monday for breakfast. Thanks so much for being here, everybody. Separate.