I've been using Unity for quite a while now, but until now, I have never opened the Unity Asset store.
Perhaps its a habit that's been ingrained in me from my university days, but when developing games at DigiPen, we try to make everything from scratch where possible. We were forbidden from using external assets and only allowed to use a select few libraries when developing our games. This restriction carried onto my work as an indie developer, where it has since become a soft rule of sorts.
However, a recent interview experience with another indie studio gave me a new perspective on using Unity3D to develop games. One of the biggest advantages of using established game engines such as Unreal Engine and Unity, is the ability to download and import third-party assets from the asset store. This includes art, audio, code, tools, etc. Almost everything that one could need to make any game that they want, given that they are willing to pay the price.
What came especially as a shock to me, was the quality of even just the free assets available on the Unity store. I cobbled together the following scene in less than few hours, using a few free Unity assets for terrain generation, the car model and controller, the volumetric fog, etc.
I like to think it looks pretty decent, considering the effort that was put in. It would have taken me a significantly longer period of time to even begin working on something like this completely from scratch.
For example, although I have some idea of the implementation of procedural terrain generation, it would likely have taken me at least a few days to code up something reliable, and certainly not with the level of control and fidelity that this asset provides. The asset in question is MapMagic 2 by Denis Pahunov.
It blows my mind that this is publicly available, with the base version provided for free. After skimming through a bit of documentation, it took me mere minutes to generate terrain convincingly resembling a wasteland, with layered, blended textures.
Yet another amazing asset is Volumetric Fog (URP) by Mirza Beig. Although Unity provides Volumetric Fog in its HDRP render pipeline by default, there is no such option available in URP; but lo and behold, there exists a FREE asset that can achieve this in Unity's URP render pipeline, perfect for my current use case.
With just these two assets, my baseline environment is basically complete, and I have my eyes set on a few other assets I can mash together to create a functional game in a matter of hours.
Either way, I was naive to believe that not using assets made me a superior indie game developer, practically speaking, one needs to make use of all the tools at his disposal, especially in such competitive times.
This seemingly silly experience has opened a whole new door for me, I believe leaving my stubborn ways behind and embracing new methods will allow my creative side to shine brighter than ever before.
In fact, doings things this way may yet improve my technical skills as well, as I can learn and take inspiration from all these high quality creations, to some day meld them into something I can really call my own.
We truly stand on the shoulders of giants.