Asset Store In-Depth: #7

Greetings from the Unity Asset Store Team!

Welcome to our October newsletter. With Halloween right around the corner, do we have some treats for you! Keep reading to learn more about our exciting new Online Services; check out our interview with Bjarne Rene of Vostopia and peruse a sampling of some Halloween-themed assets.

Plus: Asset Store Madness is on until September 30th! Check out the great selection of assets discounted up to 76%.

Online Service

The Asset Store not only accelerates your game development, it now provides tools to turn your great game into a great business.

Interview with Bjarne Rene of Vostopia

Vostopia provides customizable 3D avatars for mobile, desktop and Web games. Founded in Norway in 2009 by industry veterans Bjarne Rene, Mike Man and Tore Birkeland, Vostopia is now a small multinational team with employees in Norway, the UK and New Zealand.

Explain the concept behind Vostopia?

Our core concept is a universal avatar system. We've been making games since the early nineties, and have been playing them since the seventies, and in the era of free to play and in-app purchases, we wanted to shake things up a bit and bring a little persistence to the party.

For players, we thought it’d be cool if they were able to do more than just create and customise their avatar. We want to enable them to bring their avatar with them to new games and apps along with all the loot they’ve acquired for them. So that kick ass pirate hat they’ve just bought isn’t just locked to the game and ecosystem they bought it in. This also benefits developers as it’s another avenue of exposure for their game. Players can check out what their friends are wearing and see what games they’re from.

For developers, we provide an easy time saving solution, along with all the documentation and support they need to get customisable avatars in their games and apps, plus the tools they need to monetise. They get all the micro-transaction and store management stuff they need to create, sell and manage their game, app and avatar items and offers. It’s all packaged up nicely so that it can be integrated into a game or app in minutes!

Can you describe the role that the Unity Asset Store plays in your vision?

We think the Unity Asset Store is absolutely brilliant and it keeps getting better! It is a huge time saver and it makes it possible to get technology (that would previously require big teams of specialists) into your project in hours or minutes as opposed to months and years.

There is tech on the Asset Store that matches Vostopia avatars really well, such as Mixamo animations and Photon networking. The combination of the three gives you a great starting point to create a virtual world. By cleverly combining that with the many art assets available, the possibilities are endless.

What do you like about Unity?

We really like how flexible and powerful it is, and how quickly it is to get great results. The component based architecture makes it possible to slot different building blocks into your project, and that empowers smaller teams to build awesome things.

Do you have any advice for developers who might use your service?

Build real social experiences! With customisable avatars, you can build deeper experiences for players. They can show off their style through personalising their avatars, and interact with friends (and make new ones) inside the game worlds.

Have a play with the new animation system in Unity 4. We have had great fun playing with it so far. Different character scales are great fun! The animation trees and blending feel really good as well.

Also, have a look at the multiplayer demo we built based on Photon. It sets you up with a small environment, a lobby and a multiplayer chat room where each player has their own avatar. It is a good example of what can be done in a very short time, and a good base to build on.

And if you have any questions then please feel free to email us directly to contact@vostopia.com. We’re a friendly lot, and would love to hear your feedback and give you a hand if you need it :D

What can Unity developers look forward to in the future from Vostopia?

We are hard at work on bringing out our asset creator plan enabling our developers to create their own clothes and avatar assets that can be sold or given away within their games.

For the avatars themselves, we are working on a facial animation system that will lift them to another level. We have even more things in the pipeline, and we are also listening to feedback from our developers on what is most important, so please let us know what you need.

What is your vision for the future of game development?

We see Vostopia, Unity and game developers working hard to fill players’ insatiable need for more games to play with their avatars! Players can personalize their avatar and use them everywhere!

Beintoo

Headquartered in Milan, New York and Palo Alto, and with 200 million users all around the world, Beintoo is a true loyalty program with a full set of gamification tools - badges, missions, leaderboards, contests, etc., for mobile and web applications, games, and national offline and online retailers. Beintoo rewards user engagement with Bedollars—currency that can be redeemed in the Bestore or in the online stores of offers are available, and users can also convert their Bedollars into real cash once they shop on any websites of Beintoos’ retail partners. Via Beintoo’s reward engine, mobile developers can attain deeper user engagement and, as the developers get paid for every Bedollar redeemed by a user, they can monetize inside and outside their apps. Advertisers and retailers can use innovative tools for engaging with customers, such as customized and defined loyalty programs, that maximize the efficiency of their ad campaigns to reach conversion rates well above average.

Playhaven

PlayHaven is a powerful Lifetime Value (LTV) Maximization Platform that enables mobile game developers to control and balance their in-game marketing and monetization needs in real-time. Including tools such as internal cross-promotion, rewards, announcements, a cross-promotion widget and interstitial ads, the PlayHaven extension allows you to acquire, retain, engage, re-engage and monetize your players directly within Unity! Integrate once and enjoy true flexibility in creating, scheduling, managing and analyzing served content in real-time through PlayHaven’s web dashboard.

KGFMapSystem by KOLMICH Creations

The KGFMapSystem is the first professional, fully customizable out of the box Unity mini map and map solution. Comprehensive content (4 Skins, 118 Map Icons), basic demo scenes,quick start tutorials and professional support via the user forum make the integration a breeze.

KGFMapSystem offers a nearly endless range of configuration options, which are well-structured and displayed in the inspector. The map's skin and color, the position of the buttons, the background color, the size, the alpha mask, and much more, can be adapted to your liking.

The map also comes with a set of handy features such as:
• saveable fog of war
• option to switch between the mini map and the map
• arrows pointing in the direction of map icons which are outside the map
• static or rotating map icon orientation
• customizable zoom
• camera frustum display
• static or rotating map orientation
• map icon categories
• automatic photo capture of the game area for high performance map display

Kolmich Creations continuously adds new features and tweaks the existing ones to make them even better. So watch out for updates! Check out the demo here.

Boo!

This month we offer a Halloween Asset Sampler. Check out these assets that will bring thrills and chills to your game.

Art Assets

50 Horror Characters in One by MUSICTOONS

Playful, colorful and full of character, this fun package of characters is based on one cool, simple low-poly 3D model which you customize by applying the 50 different textures! Includes 40 animations suitable for any game genre.

3DRT Zombies Family by 3DRT

Invite this kooky cartoon zombie family into your game. Includes zombie Mom, Dad, Daughter and Son, with three different skins for each, and normal maps for each skin.

3DRT Ghoul Fantasy Monsters by 3DRT

LODs and a great variety of 20 texture alternatives, this brutish ghoul is fully rigged and comes complete with 30 cool animations.

Fat Zombie by Arabian Art Studios

This Fat Zombie has quite an appetite. His enormous, decaying body is surprisingly agile and spry when he's going after his next meal. Fully rigged with animations, three LODs and a ragdoll prefab included.

Critter Pack by Kalamona

Here’s a great resource for all the creepy crawly critters you need to populate your nightmares. This package includes a low poly animated spider, snake, rat, frog, snail, butterfly, dragonfly, and bumblebee!

Skeletons Pack by bisaniyehocam

Rigged and animated pack of Skeletons with four variations and seven animations.

Cobwebs & Threads Collection by Spreadcamp

This package contains a variety of spiderwebs to make your dungeon or haunted house a little more spooky.

Animals - Raven by BSR

Low-poly, fully rigged Raven with two texture variants and nine animations, ready to fly into your game.

Gibs N Gore by Gear Worx Productions

This package contains over 100 gory, meaty, bloody assets ready to drop into your game. Body parts, blood splats, chunks of flesh, and organs.

Grave Stones 03 by BITGEM

Cartoon styled, low-poly grave stones for your cemetery scenery.

Spooky Cartoon Props by VIS Games

Spooky, playful cartoon-styled models of gravestones, candles and other decorative items for your scenes.

Music and Sound FX

Dark Nightmares by Panozk

Horror Music for Games! Dark, eerie ambient tracks.

Horror Pack 1 by Sean Ruffin

Sound FX pack that includes creaking doors, screams, things that go bump in the night, and many more grotesque and macabre sounds.

Particle Systems

Cartoon FX Pack 2 by Jean Moreno

Skulls, ghosts, bats, blood, rain, stylized puffs of smoke, and explosions galore for both 2D and 3D applications.

Check out the first Cartoon FX Pack as well!