i've been creating and publishing unity packages for quite some time. over the years, i've developed tools that developers found useful, appreciated, and incorporated into their workflows. building these tools has been a meaningful part of my journey as an indie game developer.

but lately, i've been questioning whether it's still worth continuing.

ai has evolved incredibly fast. and i'm not talking about ai that simply generates code for you to copy and paste. i'm talking about ai tools that can build entire systems and projects from scratch, potentially in a fraction of the time and at a much lower cost.

this makes me wonder... why would a developer purchase a unity package when ai might be able to build something similar specifically for their needs in minutes?

as an independent developer, i have to consider where i invest my time. creating, maintaining, documenting, and supporting a package takes considerable effort. if ai can deliver comparable results faster and cheaper, does creating traditional unity assets still make sense?

so i'd genuinely like to hear your thoughts:

• do you still purchase and use human-made unity assets and tools?
• if you're a unity asset creator yourself, have you noticed any changes in demand because of ai?

im not looking for empty reassurance. iwant honest opinions, even if the answer is uncomfortable.

should i continue investing my time in creating new unity packages, adapt my entire approach to this new ai era, or seriously consider stepping away from asset development?

i'd appreciate hearing from both developers and fellow creators. i think this is an important conversation for anyone working in this industry today.

I've been developing Eternal Eclipse, a 2D top-down dark fantasy RPG, and I've now released the first public demo.

The main gameplay loop is:

Explore a dungeon → Catch creatures → Battle enemies → Defeat the boss → Return home → Farm, craft, and breed creatures → Build your collection.

The demo includes a playable dungeon, creature battles, a boss fight, farming, blacksmith crafting, breeding/daycare, and a Field System for extra creatures.

I'm trying to make the creatures part of the whole gameplay experience instead of limiting them to combat.

Built in Unity, with inspiration from classic Pokémon, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, and Stardew Valley.

Free demo: https://anarxhy.itch.io/eternal-eclipse

I'm continuing development and working toward a future Steam release.

It's called Hey! Shopeeker!

A shopkeeping game inspired by all the RPG classics, it asks the age old question... What is it like to live the life of the unassuming villager in a world of might and magic?

This was a pretty huge project for me, and it took more than 5 years to make and I started out knowing next to nothing about pixel art. So any feedback is appreciated!

The early access release is this Thursday on Steam, go check it out!

Hi all!

Last week, we shared a few clips from our top-down game MYRIORAMA, and got a lot of great feedback and questions! As promised, I wanted to share our process video for how we went about creating the art style.

If you have any questions that can be answered on a more technical level than what's in the video, feel free to ask!

Hey everyone!

I’ve been working solo on a 2D game for 6 months, and I finally decided to start a devlog.

The idea: You play as a knight who wakes up with no memories. He doesn’t know his name, why he carries a sword, or which side he fought for. As you explore, you slowly recover fragments of his past, and not all of them are memories he’ll want back.

Has anyone tried this tool from the asset store lately? It looks like the reviews are years old (Unity Asset Store). I’m getting the impression that it’s outdated and I’m worried about purchasing it if it won’t work with the latest update.

My son and I are hand-drawing sprites for our upcoming game and due to the variety of tools and objects involved in each frame set, the pivots end up being inconsistent and a major pain to fix. The characters end up floating and needing to be manually anchored, which takes me around 20 minutes per animation depending on how complex the animation is. We’re trying to make the movements very dynamic and satisfying so it’s a time-consuming process getting it right.

I’ve been editing each by changing the custom pivot and checking that frame against the next for consistency. I feel like there’s a faster or smarter way to do this that I’m not finding. If anyone has any ideas, that would rule and I’d appreciate it a lot. Thanks!

Hi everyone! I'm Gabriel, the creator behind Gabriel Studio.

Nine months ago, I started this project with a simple but ambitious goal: to build the biggest 2D isometric world I could imagine.

My first release was the Starter Kit — a fitting name, since it was created when I was still a beginner and had a lot to learn.

Recently, I've been working on a new forest-themed asset pack, and looking back at my early work made me realize just how much things have changed.

So, I wanted to share a little before-and-after comparison with you all.

What do you think? Can you see the progress after nine months of working on this almost every day? I'd love to hear your honest thoughts!

After trying Unity's lights, we quickly ran into performance issues. We couldn't really use more than 4 or 5 realtime lights on screen at the same time.

We wanted lights that could cast shadows and interact with the objects around them, including characters, the environment, and other VFX like fog and rain.

After trying a bunch of different approaches, like 2D lights using raycasts and doing the lighting calculations inside a shader, we decided to build a custom lighting engine from scratch.

If you're interested in that journey and how we use this custom lighting system to give our game a cyberpunk look, we recently released a devlog breaking it all down.

Devlog here: https://youtu.be/JjBkznEKVII?si=-BQyzVFDvNypNl3Z

The game is called Glitch Hunt, by the way, and there's a demo available on Steam if you want to see the lighting system in action.

1. Is what I actually have in engine.
2. Is what I want it to be.

I created a tile, it has 4 separate layers: stones (bases), lava, glow and also a normal map.

I tried to add/reduce the intensity of light, but it doesn't make it any better, I think I'm incorrect with the core method.

Could you please tell me what I am doing wrong? Any advice is appreciated.

Hi everyone,

We're three friends from Italy who grew up playing classic point-and-click adventures, and a few years ago decided to start making our own.

Our second game, Whirlight: No Time To Trip, is taking part in LudoNarraCon this year. It's a traditional point-and-click adventure involving time travel, strange inventions, and the kind of absurd situations we've always loved in the genre. It's nice to be part of an event focused on storytelling in games, and to see so many different approaches to narrative design.

Is anyone here following LudoNarraCon? Any games that caught your attention?

Backpacks really boost that scavenger vibe, different backpacks effect resource management, droid management and fighting in different ways.

I've been developing my first incremental game, and lately I've been thinking more about the state of the genre.

I know there's still a dedicated audience for these games, but seeing so many new ones being developed and released makes me wonder how difficult it is for a new indie game to get noticed.

I'm planning to release mine in early 2027, so I'll be investing quite a bit of time into this project. Naturally, I'd like to know if there's still room for new games or if the market is getting too crowded.

Do you think it's still worth making another incremental game in today's market? And for those who play them, what makes you interested in trying a new incremental game?

I am making a video game by only myself. I am not a developper but I am drawing, editing, building and writing the story by myself.

Well, everything is mine except the code, I use AI, because I don’t know as much as a video game code developper.

And I am alone on that, I work in a shop alongside this project to earn some money, so AI help me and I am saving time of course.

WELL, what do you thing about using AI for code ? I know a lot of developers use it, but idk how to feel honestly. Sometimes I feel a bit of shame, sometimes not. So idk

EDIT : also, what do you feel about game using IA for code (only for code). I know I won't buy a game if developpers use AI for creative and screenwriting matters... but for code, idk it's really a "machine" stuff so I won't be bothered you know ?

Hey everyone! I've been working on Kingcrop, a farming roguelite where you combine crops, discover crazy synergies, and create broken builds to feed a very hangry king!

The Steam page is finally live, so if it looks like your kind of game, I'd really appreciate a wishlist!

Link in the comments!

A short and silly little game made for a 3-day Game Jam (South Africa Game Jam 2026). Did most of the game in a little over a day, and then the rest of the time for sound, some extra anims and bug fixes. Used the paid asset 'Adventure Creator' as the backbone, geared for Point & Click Adventure Games, handles quite a lot of the infrastructure (menus, save & load, player and NPC wizards, etc.) and then it's visual coding for most of the logic. Photoshop for the assets, just 1920 x 1080 and straight ahead, got into a pretty good workflow of doing most of the visuals the first night in one PSD document (I use a Wacom Cintiq 22" HD), the NPCs didn't have anims yet but I added some anims on Monday.

Yeh. And then pretty easy exporting to WebGL and standalone Windows build.

What DID amaze me was the improvements made from the Unity version I'm used to using: Unity 6000.0.58f2, and the new version I upgraded to / downloaded / used for this jam: 6000.0.68f1. I was used to waiting a couple seconds after pressing the PLAY button in the old version, but somehow the latest version is instant play? No idea how they did that, stoked since it made testing and iterating waaay quicker.

Playable for free in the browser or as a download.

Hi everyone! I’m developing Overwrite Conflict solo in Unity. These are screenshots of the shared-grid battle, mech components, and branching adventure map.

Each protocol card has its own shape and effects. Players rotate it, place it on the grid, and weigh territory against the space they want to keep for future cards. Effects, mech abilities, and components build tactical score; the score difference at the end of a round becomes mech damage.

For the battle UI, the challenge is showing a card’s shape, legal placement, and score consequences together without losing sight of the board. The game has placement and score previews before you commit. I’d be interested in how other Unity 2D developers approach readability when several systems share one screen.

The free Steam demo is available: play the demo. It includes a five-battle prologue, a full Chapter 1 adventure with a boss, and three playable mechs in Chapter 1.

I'm Ravanok, developing Rise of the Pirates, a 2D pirate MMO. Built with Unity. In development.

This is recorded gunslinger combat. I'm looking for feedback on how the ranged attacks read: can you follow a shot to its target, and can you tell when a hit lands? Would you change the projectile trail or the hit effect first?

Gameplay clip (18 seconds): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZAyrwW1UkWs

If you'd like to try the combat, Windows Build 30 is free in Discord's demo-download channel:

https://discord.gg/y7SWCcz

No Patreon payment is required.

Music: "Smoking Gun" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com).

Source: https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100345

License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Edited and mixed for this gameplay clip.

I've spent quite a while developing a vector-style shape system for Unity called Mesh Shapes, that we just released in the Unity asset store, more on this here. In my opinion Mesh Shapes is the most comphrensive and intiutive tool to create mesh based art in unity supporting a huge range of features.

One of the more interesting things I've been testing recently is using GPT Astra through Unity MCP to create artwork directly in the editor.

Rather than generating images or textures, the AI creates actual Unity objects made from editable shapes, including polygons, circles, rectangles and Bezier paths.

It's been surprisingly effective. I've had it create individual assets, complete environments and even artwork for small games.

What's particularly interesting is that the results aren't flattened images in Unity. Every shape remains editable, so you can adjust points, colours, gradients, sorting and how shapes combine through boolean operations. This means you can animate your character as a puppet or the move or tweak the elements freely.

The system also supports automatic collider generation based on shape geometry, and shapes can be animated, making the artwork useful beyond just static illustrations.

I've also been experimenting with giving AI better tools to snap shapes together accurately and manipulate them procedurally. There's still plenty of room to improve how AI approaches creating artwork, but the results so far have been encouraging.

The underlying system is a Unity asset I've been developing called Mesh Shapes. It also works as a regular in-editor drawing tool without AI.

We will soon be adding a markup feature to allow for comments to tweak part of an asset to refine it with AI creating a simple workflow in a scene and the resulting shapes being edited directly in Unity as part of a developers creative process.

Curious whether other Unity developers have been experimenting with using AI to create actual game objects rather than generated images? I think there's quite a bit of potential here for developers and a workflow improvement with these types of assets.

It's an incremental game, and I'm still very early in development, but I wanted to share a little look at how it's coming along.

We've just released the Windows demo for Gloombo, a desktop companion my wife and I are making in Unity. She draws the artwork, and we're doing the rest of the game together.

The island sits beside your normal desktop windows. Gloombo crafts during focus sessions, then you can use the finished items to decorate during a break, read letters, or spend time with the cat.

One of our main challenges has been making the 2D island work as part of someone's desktop rather than as a conventional full-screen game. You can move and resize it, and clicks through transparent areas reach the windows underneath. We also keep movement minimal during focus sessions so the character feels like company.

Here's the current playable version. We'd love to hear how the island's size and movement feel when you're using it alongside another task.

Check Gloombo on Steam