Unity3D and the ad-ons that really help developers & some other stuff about developing in unity!

First and foremost, what is unity? Unity3D is a user friendly game development engine that is widely used by game developer’s world wide and some notable game that were made in the engine are Ori and the Blind Forest & Implosion - Never Lose Hope.

Moving on to the community, there is a lot of support from the development community though numerous Facebook groups to reedit to even game development channels on chat platforms such as discord. Ask one question and you will get answers from multiple sources and while getting those answers you will set off a discussion and probably becoming a pro in the topic   that you asked a question about.  In one account I had expressed the difficulty to purchase an add on due to personal reasons and I really liked and wanted to use and by chance its developer saw it and offered me a code for it which was very generous of him this was a great example of how giving the community is in addition to it being overly helpful.

Back to the engine, it is   very very easy to use, in the last two years I have used it I have found that it is simpler to use than some other game engines such as unreal engine and much more versatile than game maker or gamesalad type engines. one could say I have grown attached to the engine because of its simplicity and versatility.

An example of its simplicity is that you only need to right click to make a game object and can prototype a game within a week with no prior development!

An introduction into ad-ons and what they are? to simply put it they are tools used within the engine which make the development of games easier and are usually tools which are not included in the engines. Many tools are bought off the unity asset store which is much like the steam games store but a store for tools, textures and even entire levels! These tools can by anything from a A* system for a game to a terrain generator which really makes development of games easier.

In the last few years I have used quiet a few add ons but one that really deserves recognition is Gaia which is a terrain generator created by an Engineer& developer over the period of 5 years. The level generator has some powerful sub-tools such as a stamper which can take height maps and convert them into a terrain along with some other tools such as the spawn system which can help the user populate the terrain with flora and fauna but that’s not all! you can also spawn entire villages using the add on.

The tools are also widely used by many large developers and have overwhelmingly positive reviews on the store due the the ease of use of the tool along with the

Quiet recently the developer has also released the spawn tool which is “More intuitive and more capable” than the one used in Gaia named Gena. The links to the ad ons are in the link below along with a video demo by the developer himself!