6 Unity Plugins You Should Know

In Codigames, we develop our games using Unity. It is a powerful engine and provides a great development interface for programmers and artists.

We also use some plugins that makes the development a lot easier and allows us to focus in game design. There are plenty of plugins available in the Unity Market, but we think these addons are the most useful for any video game developer. Here is our favourite Unity plugins list. Feel free to share your thoughts about it in the comments.

NGUI

Unity includes a Graphic User Interface system, but it is hard to customize and the final result isn’t very good looking. Unity announced that version 4.6 will include a new GUI system but, for now, the best choice is NGUI.

NGUI provides a fantastic UI system and it is written in C#. The developers followed the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid) which means that code is quite clean and it is not difficult to extend its funcionality.

2D Toolkit

Unity 4.3, released on November 2013, included 2D native support. Since then, Unity has support for sprites and 2D Physics. Furthermore, it included a animation tool. So, in fact, you don’t need anything more than Unity to develop a good 2D game.

However, 2D Toolkit plugin is still an useful add-on for your project. The plugin provides tools for helping developers create games for different screen resolutions. Also, the animation editor included in 2D Toolkit it is better than the Unity editor in some ways. As developer, you can choose to use one of them or both.

If you are new to 2D development in Unity or you are looking for a first contact with Unity trough 2D development, we strongly recommend you this tutorial from Pixelnest Studio.

Photon

If your are planning to include some features like cross-patform game, multiplayer or even a chat, then Photon Realtime will be your best friend.

Photon Realtime is actually a service that can be easily integrated in yout Unity project. It is a paid service, but they have a free plan. Your game can have up to 20 concurrent players in the free plan. It is possible to update your plan at anytime, so you can use it for free while developing, and change it when you decide to launch your game.

Prime[31] Plugins

Prime[31] have been making mobile applications and games for a while. They have some interesting plugins for Unity that you can buy and use in your projects. For us, these are the most important ones.

StoreKit

If you plan to include an in-app store in your iOS game, this plugin will help you with that. Of course, you still have to setup iTunes Connect, but StoreKit will make the IAP development less painful.

Social Networking

Nowadays, mobile game means social game. At least in the way that you can share scores with your friends through Twitter and/or Facebook. This plugin allows you to connect to these two social network and let the player share its achievements or screenshots of your game.

Etcetera

This plugin includes some functionalities not present in other add-ons. You should include it in your project if you need things like a SMS composer, camera picker, alerts, or a rate-this-app popup.

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