Springtime newcomers to the Unity Asset Store

With springtime comes hopping rabbits, flowers blossoming, and fresh green leaves on the trees.  You can pretty much say the same about the Unity Asset Store this April: business is hopping, the catalog is blossoming, and many sellers find fresh green in their bank accounts!  (*ducks*).  We are nearing the 20K registered Asset Store user mark, have multiple top sellers now making nearly $1000/day, and a steady stream of new content keeps rolling in.  Here's a selection of new, popular and exciting additions to the store..

One of the most popular newcomers is NeoPax's VIZIO, which has taken off like a rocket!  VIZIO is a node-based logic editor which will feel quite friendly to anyone who has ever used Virtools.  Their motto "Imagination + Create Art + Draw Blocks + Create the Game" pretty much sums up the workflow VIZIO brings to the Unity developer. VIZIO is the second node-based editor on the Asset Store, preceded by Hutong Games' popular PlayMaker, another top-selling visual node-based-editor.

If the reactions on the forum and in-store reviews are any indicator, both editors appear to be quite successful already.  If you're looking for an alternative to text-based scripting, check these two powerful new tools out!

One of my personal new favorites this month is iGui by Avam Studios, the first true WYSIWYG gui editor on the Asset Store. With iGui, you create user interfaces the visual way-- dragging and placing GUI elements from the iGui toolbar directly into the game window.  It features nested containers, various alignment settings, draggable windows, drop-down menus, buttons, ready-to-go mobile slider panels and much more.  When a user interacts with these elements, it calls events which you specify right in the inspector window. Truly fantastic for UI artists, iGui allows you to create great interfaces without ever having to touch the OnGUI event in code-- and if you don't know what OnGUI means, this is UI tool for you! Once you have it, you'll never imagine UI design in Unity without it.  It's completely compatible with UnityGUI skins, so you can easily customize the UI style as you please--  and don't forget, we have a growing assortment of UnityGUI Skins on the Asset Store too!

Also on the incredibly-hot-asset-list is Edy's Vehicle Physics, by the mysterious content provider known simply as Edy(tm).  Whoever he or she is, Edy has done a fine job creating a vehicle editing system with results which (according to some reviewers) surpass the driving experience in the GTA(tm) series. Quite a claim!  Personally I find it quite a lot of fun and relatively straightforward to create realistically behaved vehicles-- from slow, lumbering, heavy school buses to slick, high performance sports cars.  Not only does it provide a great framework and editor for designing your vehicles, it also comes with four well-made prefab vehicles which you can adapt to your needs. Definitely one of the best vehicle editors on the Asset Store.  If you're making a game with any kind of land vehicle, Edy's Vehicle Physics is going to be a huge timesaver.

Mixamo's in-editor plugin continues to be a popular way for animating characters right inside Unity.  Simply drag your rigged character from the Hierarchy View right into the Mixamo plugin window, you might have to do a bit of bone retargeting with a few clicks (easy), and suddenly your character is tapped into terabytes of animation data on the Mixamo database!  With some adjustment to sliders, you can procedurally adapt the animation's movement and cadence to suit your character, right in the Unity editor, whether it's a lumbering, slow moving giant or a little mouse!

Don't forget-- if you're a modeler, artist, sound designer, scripter, or hardcore programmer, you can sell your content to nearly 20K registered Asset Store users.  Submit your masterpiece to the Unity Asset Store!