Table of Contents
The Best Unity Assets for Game Developers (2021 Edition)
Unity’s mission has been to democratize game development and put developers in the best position to succeed. One avenue that they used to fulfill that goal is the Unity Asset Store. Here, developers can search for various assets that they can seamlessly integrate into their game projects within the Unity engine. Examples of Unity3D assets include shaders, scripts, graphical tools, 3D models, animations, plug-ins, SDK’s, and much more. This benefits the content creators and service providers as well as the customers that implement the assets; saving valuable development hours.
Unity Asset Store Black Friday Sale 2020
The sales runs from November 17, 2020 – December 4, 2020. Here are the list of Daily Deals:
November 20: Game Character Voice Bundle – Save $118+
November 21: African Big Pack – Save $140
November 22: SoundToolKit – Save $349+
November 23: PATCH – Updating System [FULL] – Save $97+
November 24: SCI FI CHARACTERS MEGA PACK Vol 1 – Save $244+
November 25: RPG Editor: ORK Framework – Save $70+
Tip 1: Purchasing a Unity Plus or Unity Pro Subscription comes with some awesome benefits.
You can purchase Unity Pro here:
A few common questions I often see on social media are “Which Unity Asset Should I Purchase?”, or “What are the best tools on the Unity Asset store”. Most of those answers refer to free Unity Assets, which in my opinion don’t need to be recommended, as there’s no risk to obtaining free Unity assets (perhaps with implementing them into live production, or maybe with the time it takes to test them). I might benefit if you decide to purchase any of these items, but it does not affect the asset publisher in any way. Also, if you are an asset publisher or know one that would like to be featured in this list, please feel free to contact me and I’ll take a look.
Tip 2: If you find an asset that you really like, but can’t currently afford, you should add it to your wishlist. The Unity Asset Store (or the publisher) will occasionally have promotional discounts – sometimes multiple assets will go on sale at the same time, so check back frequently to find deals! Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and May Madness sales occur on a regular basis.
The answer to the question of which paid unity assets you should purchase depends entirely on your needs. A developer well-versed in programming but lacking in artistic or design ability may be interested in 3D models and other art assets. At the same time, a more creative developer may need some pre-built scripts to compensate for their lack of programming expertise. In no particular orders, here are some of the top ten game development software tools that I found on the Unity Asset Store:
Network & Online Gameplay Tools
Best HTTP/2 (Pro Edition) by Tivadar Gyorgy Nagy
Best HTTP (Pro Edition) is a network plugin for Unity3D. It supports REST, WebSocket, Socket.IO, and SignalR request customization (others as well). This would be ideal for games that involve online multiplayer gameplay as a core design component.
Photon PUN+ by Exit Games
Photon PUN+ is a networking plugin for Unity Games. It includes cloud game hosting for up to 100 concurrent players, which could be quite useful for beta testing new games.
Animation Tools
UMotion Pro (Animation Editor) by Soxware Interactive
UMotion Pro is one of the best animation tools for Unity.
LipSync Pro by Rogo Digital
LipSync Pro can be quite useful if you use a lot of character dialogue in your game.
Final IK by RootMotion
Final IK can save you time with their advanced character animation systems for Unity Games.
VertExmotion Pro
VertExmotion Pro by Kalagaan is a shader-based softbody system combined with a procedural animation system. It allows for the easy animation of things like hair and clothes.
Audio Tools
Master Audio: AAA Sound by Dark Tonic Inc.
Master Audio: AAA Sound is Unity’s premier audio solution. A game’s sound & music can be one of its best qualities.
Physics Tools
PuppetMaster by RootMotion
RootMotion also created the Final IK asset (found with the unity animation tools), which pairs nicely with PuppetMaster. The ragdoll and behavior system makes it easy to add physics to your characters.
It enables developers to continue playing an animation on their ragdolls through physical muscle torque. This tool for animating ragdolls adds intelligence & realism to biped characters, so developers can dynamically adjust muscle and pin weights, edit colliders and joints in the Scene View.
Edy’s Vehicle Physics by Angel Garcia “Edy”
Edy’s Vehicle Physics will help you not have to reinvent the wheel (no pun intended) when figuring out how to adjust your game’s physics. Of course, you may choose to not use realistic physics for certain types of racing games, which is your prerogative as a game developer.
Terrain Tools
GAIA by Procedural Worlds
Gaia is an all-in-one terrain generator designed for game artists to create in-game worlds at scale.
World Creator Professional by BiteTheBytes
World Creator Professional is a procedural terrain & landscape generator for Unity. BiteTheBytes won the Best Game Technology award.
TerrainComposer 2 by Nathaniel Doldersum
TerrainComposer 2 is a node based terrain generator for Unity. It makes it easy for developers to create visually stunning game environments.
MapMagic World Generator by Denis Pahunov
Visual Scripting Tools
Amplify Shader Editor by Amplify Creations
Amplify Shader Editor is a node-based shader creation tool. I like it because it has an interface that appeals to both programmers and artists alike. You can connect nodes to each other and adjust the respective properties thanks to Amplify’s UI design.
Behavior Designer by Opsive
Behaviour Designer allows Unity developers to create behaviour trees in order to control in-game elements of artificial intelligence.
Playmaker
Playmaker by Hutong Games LLC is one of the Asset Store’s all-time best sellers. It’s a visual scripting tool for Unity that was used in games like Hearthstone.
Nottorus by Stridemann
Nottorus is a scripting and debugging tool for Unity that helps game programmers visualize logic similar to the Unreal engine.
Utilities & Miscellaneous Tools
Odin (Inspector and Serializer) by Devdog
DevDog has built quite a few Unity assets, and Odin is one of their best. It allows you to optimize your project’s workflow and save thousands of development hours.
Advanced Tools Mega Pack
The Advanced Tools Mega Pack by Ultimate Game Tools combines multiple tools into one valuable bundle, which helps developers cut down on cost. It includes Mesh Simplify, Concave Collider, Ultimate Rope Editor, and more.
Obfuscator by Beebyte
Obfuscator helps you protect your game’s code and art assets from reverse engineering.
UFPS : Ultimate FPS by Opsive
UFPS : Ultimate FPS is a Unity project template for First-Person Shooters (FPS). FPS games have been around since the earliest days of PC Gaming. This templates allow game creators to get started without having to reinvent the wheel.
Editor Console Pro by FlyingWorm
Editor Console Pro is a Unity editor extension. While Unity already has an editor console included, this asset provides additional functionality in order to enhance productivity.
A* Pathfinding Project Pro by Aron Granberg
A* Pathfinding Project Pro is scripting/AI Unity Asset. It is used to help program the pathfinding of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in games. This would be to instruct enemies how to move in the game.
Virtual Reality & Video Tools
VR Panorama by OliVR
VR Panorama 360 allows you to render 4K videos and 360-degree panoramas in Unity.
Game Art, Animation & Design Assets for Unity
Pro Radar Builder by DaiMangou
DaiMangou’s goal is to create assets that don’t require any coding, which is a noble effort. Their Pro Radar Builder has been used in virtual reality games like ioMoon and Space Pirate Trainer. They also have the Storyteller asset.
Colorful FX by Thomas Hourdel
Colorful FX is a set of fullscreen & (game) camera effects for Unity games. It is particularly useful for color adjustments and post-processing effects.
Mega-Fiers by Chris West
Mega-Fiers is a system for implementing animation, deformation, and morphing modifiers. Such modifications can give your game more visual complexity. The asset publisher also released Mega Shapes, which is great for level design:
Mega Shapes
(See above).
Surforge by Sergey Vladimirov
Surforge is a tool for 3D-rendered texturing. It’s even great for those still learning the basics of game textures and 3D modelling.
NGUI: Next-Gen UI by Tasharen Entertainment
NGUI: Next-Gen UI is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) plugin on the Unity Asset Store. Outside of the actual gameplay mechanics, well-design GUI’s are key to a making a game playable. Players could be switching weapons, adjusting controls or music volume, pausing the game, or a plethora of other possibilities, but they must be able to navigate options seamlessly. NGUI has drag & drop controls already made so that developers don’t need to invest time in making a UI from scratch.
Octave3D by Ocatmodius
Octave3D helps Unity developers build levels with prefabs.
UBER Standard Shader Ultra by Tomasz Stobierski
UBER Standard Shader Ultra allows game developers to add AAA shaders to their scenes.
2D Unity Game Assets
Super Tilemap Editor by Creative Spore
Super Tilemap Editor gives game developers an easy way to create tile-based games. For those of you that aren’t familiar with tilemaps, they are a set of tiles that make up the building blocks of some 2D games. It was, and still is, a widespread technique that originally created to work with memory usage and graphics performance limitations on previous generations of hardware.
Pro Camera 2D
Pro Camera 2D by Luis Pedro Fonseca is the definitive 2D & 2.5D Unity camera plugin. It has many necessary features for 2D game development projects, like orthographic & perspective cameras. A Finalist in the 2016 Asset Store Awards, it is fully compatible with Unity 2019. It also includes PlayMaker custom actions (see above).
Corgi Engine by More Mountains
Corgi Engine is a solution for creating 2D & 2.5D platformer games in Unity. Notable examples of the platformer genres include the Mario Bros. and Metroid game franchises. Adding 2D game support to Unity was a frequent request for years. While the native editor has improved, this is almost a new game engine within an engine. There’s also a Corgi Mega Bundle containing handcrafted 2D art.
TopDown Engine
The creator of Corgi Engine, More Mountains, also release a 2D game development tool, TopDown Engine, for games that have a perspective from above. Famous examples of this game view styles include the early iterations of the Zelda and Final Fantasy game series.
DoozyUI by Doozy Entertainment
DoozyUI is another UI tool for Unity that’s compatible with any other asset that uses uGUI correctly since it only works with native components.
DOTween Pro by Demigiant
DOTween Pro is a tool to help with game animations and transitions.
Mesh Baker by Ian Deane
Mesh Baker allows you to combine meshes, which could improve the memory/graphical performance of Unity games.
Fingers Touch Gestures by Digital Ruby (Jeff Johnson)
Fingers Touch Gestures is useful for mobile games that require special touch controls.
Environment, Terrain, and World Building Assets for Unity Games
Fantasy Environment by BRAiNBOX
Fantasy Environment is a collection of various game props and materials to give a mythical vibe for games made in Unity.
Polyquest Worlds Full Pack Vol.1 by POLYBOX
POLYQUEST Worlds is a pack of exquisite low poly game art assets compatible with both mobile and virtual reality games. While $299.99 may seem like a steep price tag for some indies, bear in mind that amount is only a fraction of what a professional technical artist would earn in a month. Also note that it would very likely take more than a month to reproduce these scenes.
Low Poly Unity Assets
Low Poly Series: Landscape by Stoolfeather Games
POLYGON – Pirates Pack by Synty Studios
POLYGON – Pirates Pack is a set of low poly graphical assets fit for pirate games.
Synty Studios also published another series:
Simple World – Volume One
Conclusion and Honorable Mentions
Here are a few previously listed assets that are now either free, included with Unity itself, or otherwise no longer available:
Platformer PRO 2 by JNA Mobile
Platformer PRO 2 was a 2D/2.5D kit for Unity developers that helped them create platformer games. It included built-in functionality to do the hard parts for them, such as jump physics and other movement systems.
Rex Engine: Classic 2D Platformer Engine by Sky Tyrannosaur
Rex Engine: Classic 2D Platformer Engine was a 2D platformer engine built on top of Unity. It had a ton of classic game mechanics and a completely custom 2D physics engine.
Text Mesh Pro by Stephan Bouchard
(Update: 7/22/2017 – There is now a free version of this plugin available on the Unity Asset Store.)
Text Mesh Pro is a tool that helps Unity developers create customized text inside their games.
Shader Forge by Freya ‘Acegikmo’ Holmér
Update: Shader Forge is no longer available. More info here on Twitter.
Shader Forge was a Unity asset that helps game developers create and adjust shaders. Shaders are how games adjust lighting, darkness, and various visual special effects.
ProCore Bundle by ProCore
Update: ProBuilder is now apart of Unity itself! Congratulations to the team. More info is here on Unity’s blog.
ProCore Bundle was a suite of level design apps for Unity. It is intended to allow developers to complete tasks that would normally have to be done within separate programs, such as Maya or Max. This change in the process of making a game reflects upon a wave within software development as a whole: rapid prototyping. As many Indie developer teams consist only of a handful of people, it is essential that they quickly iterate on new game level builds. It is a handy tool that solves the issue of how to build static meshes in Unity.
DevDog’s Inventory Pro was a Unity3D asset that allowed game developers to manages their in-game inventory systems, which can include items, equipment, weapons, and currencies. It was a must-have for most RPG games, as they usually involve quite a few items.
This year it’s called the Best of Unity Super Sale, and it runs from November 17, 2020 through December 4, 2020. Over 700 assets will be on sale for up to 50% off. Daily Deals will be returning as well, where a single asset will be on sale for 70% off.
After reading some reviews of these assets, I noticed that some customers have asked: ‘Why isn’t this included natively in Unity’. This highlights one of the great reason why Unity Assets are great for the indie game development ecosystem. Unity Asset Store publishers can fill gaps left by missing features and capabilities in the engine itself. Solo developers or small teams can save valuable time by purchasing these ready-to-use assets, and asset creators get a share of each sale for their efforts. Symbiotic relationships like these are key towards developing a beneficial ecosystem.
Did I miss any? Feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll check it out. Thanks for reading!
Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, which means a commision may be received by us if you click a link and purchase something that was listed and/or recommended on here. Wufasta LLC is not a corporate affiliate or subsidiary of Unity and this site is not endorsed by Unity. “Unity”, “Unity Asset Store”, and the Unity Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Unity Technologies or its affiliates in the U.S. (Unity®) and elsewhere.”
JB
Hi Nolan,
Nice list of assets! One asset that I love and I think should be there is Digger (link: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/terrain/digger-caves-overhangs-135178).
I find it to be the perfect tool to create natural caves in terrains. Just my two cents
Juan David Nicholls
Check this new plugin for http requests and using rest apis with Unity https://github.com/proyecto26/RestClient
Karthik
Hello Nolan
I am new to Unity, me and my friend started to working together we do the same project from different places , i would like to know the license terms if i buy and can i able to share with him the utility, we do the project together or we have to log the account both side the one purchased the assets?
2, all are this can able to use for commercial purpose on my projects?
Nolan Clemmons
Hello Karthik,
I’m pleased to hear that you are beginning to learn Unity!
To answer your first question, whether or not you can share a particular utility depends on the specific asset. If you see the phrase: “This extension requires one license per seat”, then each of you would need to purchase it separately.
As for commercial use, that wouldn’t matter for Unity Assets, but rather for the Unity engine license itself. Look at the terms for the Pro version vs. Plus vs. the personal edition to see what the rules are. It says on the Unity website:
Hope that helps!
jon
terrain composer, gaia, map magic, and world creator… all of them are awesome. I think i will get Map Magic cause it can procedurally generate terrain at runtime, and i think it supports biomes.
san
hello.
I have a question.
I should call rest api on my unity project.
I consider between ‘best http’ asset and UnityWebRequest.
Can you recommend? and why?
Juan David Nicholls
Check this other plugin https://github.com/jdnichollsc
Tivadar György Nagy
Hi san,
If you want to use it only for REST api, the new UnityWebRequest can be a good choice too.
Tivadar