Unity – My Experience Making Unity Assets

Unity – My Experience making Assets

I’ve been making Unity assets for almost a year now. It’s been fun getting back into the game development sphere. Currently I have these Unity assets that I have put on the store. Most of them are free. I have found that it is very difficult to get downloads for a paid asset. Most people are just unwilling to pay any price, even 99 cents, for a Unity asset. I have had great success getting good amounts of free downloads however.

The assets on the Asset Store that do make good money are very well done and professional looking. I have one asset that I believe meets that criteria, Procedural Lightning for Unity. I have probably spent about 100 hours on this asset fine tuning it and making it the best lightning on the Unity Asset Store.

This brings me to my experience about making assets. Here are some Do’s and Don’ts for making assets on the Unity Asset Store:

Do:
– Make your icon, small image and main image look professional and eye catching. This is the first thing people see. If this looks bad, they are probably not going to even read about your asset or watch any videos.
– For paid assets, create an asset that is a time saver and great value. People want an asset that does something specific, and does that thing well. My Procedural Lightning asset is great as a drop in solution for creating lightning. In a matter of seconds, you can have lightning bolts.
– Create videos. Make sure to have at least one video (preferably more) demonstrating how cool your asset is. Add some great inspiring or upbeat music to the video and make sure the video looks professional.
– Create screenshots. Some people are too lazy to watch videos, so add a few screenshots for people to see at a glance.
– Make good documentation. At a minimum, have a detailed readme file explaining everything your asset can do. For really involved assets, create a PDF with a table of contents, pictures and diagrams.
– Get reviews. If someone buys your asset, ask them nicely to write a review for you to give you feedback. Most people are willing to give good, honest feedback.
– Offer coupon codes. Find people in the Unity community to try your asset and write a review by giving them a free download code.
– Make sure your asset folder can be moved to a different sub folder. People like to organize their folders in many different ways, so don’t hard code paths. Instead, hard code unique file names and scan the assets folder recursively for those files.
– Write good, quality, bug free and well documented code. This goes a long, long way for keeping your users happy.
– Support 2D and 3D mode. Add a Camera property or use Camera.main in your scripts and check the orthographic bool property. Make sure your asset works well in both 2D and 3D modes. I’ve done this with my Procedural Lightning and it has paid great dividends.

Don’t:
– Don’t try and sell a simple or crude asset at all. Make them free. I’ve seen some assets that are 10 USD or 50 USD that are just horrible. I can’t imagine anyone buying those assets, ever…
– Refuse to give someone their money back. If someone isn’t happy, for any reason, especially within 7 days, just give them their money back. I’ve had trouble with some assets on the store and it’s been a chore to get a refund. This means I will never buy from those companies again. Don’t make the same mistake.
– Put a half finished or buggy asset on the store. This will tarnish your company, yourself and just frustrate people. Just don’t do it.
– Hard code paths. Hard coding paths is a bad idea. Less evil is hard coding file names, but do that sparingly. Scanning the root folder recursively for files with unique names is tolerable.
– Don’t ever steal, copy or re-use resources from other assets on the store without asking the owner of those assets. For paid assets, this is a no-no and you should not even ask. For free assets, always ask the creator first and make sure the license is compatible with your project.
– Create generic assets. People want something that provides immediate benefit to their project. Unity is already a great API and engine. People generally don’t want another API or engine asset. They want something that does a specific task for them. This is not an absolute, but something to keep in mind.

I hope these tips help you. I’m still fairly new at this Asset Store stuff but am learning every day.

Best wishes!