{"id":3918,"date":"2019-11-26T19:54:38","date_gmt":"2019-11-26T18:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/t-machine.org\/?p=3918"},"modified":"2019-11-26T19:57:48","modified_gmt":"2019-11-26T18:57:48","slug":"improving-the-unity-assetstore-what-id-like-to-see-in-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/2019\/11\/26\/improving-the-unity-assetstore-what-id-like-to-see-in-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Improving the Unity AssetStore: what I&#8217;d like to see in 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of Unity3D&#8217;s greatest successes has been the Asset Store. Bursting to life 9 years ago, initially sounding a lot like an optimistic clone of Apple&#8217;s 2-year-old App Store (and boasting the same 70%\/30% revenue share), it turned out to be so much more.<\/p>\n<p>But Unity still struggles to figure out what it should look like and how it should work for users\/purchasers. The raw content is the biggest determinant of the store&#8217;s success, but closely followed by the browsing and discovery experience &#8211; which have hardly improved at all (and in some ways have gone backwards) over this past decade.<\/p>\n<p>Based on hundreds of purchases, and having launched and maintained some small assets on the store myself over the past 5 years, here&#8217;s what I&#8217;d like to see now.<\/p>\n<h2>The A-test for Unity Assets<\/h2>\n<p>Every asset-purchase page should have a section that answers the critical, machine-answerable, fully 100% automatable questions that matter to purchasers. There is no excuse to miss this out &#8211; these make a huge difference both to users, and to authors, and to Unity itself: they massively reduce the amount of refund requests, and increase the purchase volume due to increased buyer-confidence.<\/p>\n<p>How well do your assets score on these? If you&#8217;re an author, do you publish all this information up-front (some do &#8211; their Full Description on the asset page is long and scrolly)<\/p>\n<h3>Art Assets<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Min\/avg\/max verts per model in package<\/li>\n<li>Top 3 shaders in package, with number of models that use each<\/li>\n<li>Min\/avg\/max texture sizes in package<\/li>\n<li>Total number of materials with unassigned textures\/colors vs fully assigned<\/li>\n<li>Total number of materials using Standard shader with Albedo, Metallic, Normal, Roughness maps assigned<\/li>\n<li>Total number of models with LODs vs number of models without LODs<\/li>\n<li>Min\/Max LOD levels for models with at least one LOD<\/li>\n<li>Number of prefabs in package that have same prefix-name as an FBX\/model file<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Code Assets<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Number of files that include source code (C#) vs number without source code<\/li>\n<li>Number of (Unity official) Unit-tests in package<\/li>\n<li>(one line for each Unity version): Num Errors, Num Warnings, when installing the project<\/li>\n<li>(one line for each Unity version): Num Errors, Num Warnings, when opening the marked demo-scene<\/li>\n<li>(one line for each Unity version): Num Errors, Num Warnings, when pressing play in the marked demo-scene<\/li>\n<li>(one line for each Unity version): Number of Unit tests passed, number failed<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>All Assets<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Number of demo scenes in package<\/li>\n<li>PDF documentation in package<\/li>\n<li>Time since Author&#8217;s last edit of package (upload)<\/li>\n<li>Time since Author&#8217;s last discussion of package (meta files + comment threads)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Self-reported \/ author-tagged info<\/h2>\n<p>All the above was easily automatable by Unity (Apart from &#8220;issue reports&#8221;, which Unity keeps private, I&#8217;ve written scripts myself that do all of them!)<\/p>\n<p>What happens when we extend the Asset Store Publisher Upload tool to let authors add extra info that Unity can then collate and publish? Well&#8230;<\/p>\n<h3>Art Assets &#8211; author controlled<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Render-pipelines supported: Default?, URP?, HDRP? (tickboxes)<\/li>\n<li>Player platforms compatible: Windows, PS, XB, VR, iOS, Android, WebGL (tickboxes: &#8220;compatible&#8221; means &#8220;author expects it to work, but isn&#8217;t actively testing that platform &#8211; it may not work out of the box&#8221;)<\/li>\n<li>Player platforms supported: Windows, PS, XB, VR, iOS, Android, WebGL (tickboxes: &#8220;supported&#8221; means &#8220;author actively tests on this platform and promises it will work out of the box (or fixed very rapidly)&#8221;)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Nice-to-have&#8217;s only Unity can provide<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Ask-the-author question box on purchase page (SO MANY TIMES people need to check if an asset supports X or Y, or ask the author if they include something, and Unity still provides no way for the purchaser to do this)<br \/>\n&#8230;with answered-questions automatically appearing for all to see (just like Amazon has done for the past 15+ years)<\/li>\n<li>Number of reported issues per Unity version (OR: star-rating per unity version)<\/li>\n<li>Number of refund requests (successful + unsuccessful) by Unity version and\/or package version<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>2020 future-looking awesome &#8220;make everyone rich&#8221; features<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>When author uploads the asset, choose a Demo scene that will be auto-built as a WebGL build and embedded in Asset Store page (if build succeeds)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of Unity3D&#8217;s greatest successes has been the Asset Store. Bursting to life 9 years ago, initially sounding a lot like an optimistic clone of Apple&#8217;s 2-year-old App Store (and boasting the same 70%\/30% revenue share), it turned out to be so much more. But Unity still struggles to figure out what it should look [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3918"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3918"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3920,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3918\/revisions\/3920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}