Unity Third-Party Plugins

Photics

I saw this... http://prime31.com/unity/ ...and it was frustrating! Just about every feature that should be in GameSalad was available for Unity - and third-party plugins made it easy.

I think Gendai Games should do something like this! Instead of just sitting around for months, wondering if they're actually going to do something about the issues plaguing the community, we could fix it ourselves. But unfortunately, GameSalad is currently closed to customizations.

jstrahan

+1

quantumsheep

That's a good find.

I think a more interesting question would be, how much would you pay for these plug-ins, if introduced to GameSalad?

If the current pro features were made into plug-ins, how much would they be worth to the community?

etc etc

QS

BeyondtheTech

i recommended an a la carte solution similar to this, but there's a lot of things that people would want standard, including some basics like arrays, custom fonts, and better string support, before they jump into additional features like StoreKit and VoiceChat.

Photics

quantumsheep said:
I think a more interesting question would be, how much would you pay for these plug-ins, if introduced to GameSalad?

If the current pro features were made into plug-ins, how much would they be worth to the community?

That's not exactly the point. It's been almost two months since GameSalad has been updated. What are the next big updates... pause and performance? That's great, but what about Game Center? Will that feature make it into the next update?

Gendai Games is a small team. While we're waiting for the next update, competitors are moving forward.

If you divided the features of Pro into plug-ins, the prices would be absurd...

Hyperlinks - $500
iAds - $500
custom loading screen - $500
3 support tickets - $500

I don't think that's going to work. For $599 I can upgrade to CS5 and get a lot better value. For $300 I think I can make iPhone games with Unity... a 3D gaming platform.

quantumsheep

I didn't say 'divide up the current pro features and tell me how much they cost'. I can do that myself, thanks.

I said 'How much would they be worth to the community'.

If an a la carte system was implemented, how would the community like to see it work? How much would they imagine each feature costing?

These are more interesting questions to me, as it directly relates to GameSalad, which I use, and is based off the 'plug-in' stuff you mention that's only applicable to Unity.

BTT got it.

QS

Photics

quantumsheep said:
I said 'How much would they be worth to the community'.

I think that's a bad question. It's like asking, "How much should Pro cost?" It seems obvious that the majority of developers here think Pro should be less expensive. $500 seems to be a common response. I don't think it makes good business sense to divide that up further with plugins.

A common suggestion - only one version of GameSalad should be available.

The reason I posted about plugins is not to suggest Gendai Games lower the price of Pro. They should have enough common sense to figure that out already. (I think charging for plugins would complicate things.) The reason I mention plugins is because Gendai Games moves too slow. GameSalad developers are currently missing out on another iTunes gold rush.

TymeMaster

Did you guys see the 2d game plugins they have? Named sprite manager 2.

There is also a wiki with tons of free scripts

http://www.anbsoft.com/middleware/
http://itween.pixelplacement.com/index.php
http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

By the way, this guy has some awesome tutorials. http://fearedfuturegames.com/tutorials/tutorials.htm

He has a huge series, the first 17 parts are free, and for 1 payment of 9 bucks you get the rest (so far he is up to 29).

Note; ALL the addons work with the basic version, you do not need Unity Pro. The reason why is they are mostly .Net extensions.

fatmike

Great find. I've been playing around with a concept in GameSalad, Unity and Corona.

Whatever happens my next game MUST have OpenFeint and/or GameCenter....2 of those currently offer it!

Although Unity has a nice 2D platformer tutorial, it didn't feel natural developing 2D games in the 3D GUI.

Corona is interesting and it's the last day before the Game Edition goes up from $99. I was holding out to see what GameSalad was going to offer...it's going to be a busy night of comparing!