Let me start by telling you something you probably already knew when you got here – Unity is hands-down one of the best game development software out there.
But why, you might ask. Well, I could probably write a book about it and I’d certainly still leave some stuff out. That’s why today I’ll just talk about one of my favorite features, editor extensions/plugins.
If you come from a programming background you’ve probably experienced times when you wished that your IDE, SDK or even code editor could do a little bit more to speed up your workflow.
Well, with Unity you can. Using the power of editor scripts you can build pretty much anything you can think of to make sure you’re optimizing your (and your team’s) time.
That’s exactly what we (the X-Team Games team) did. When we noticed that pretty much every game we were doing required some sort of an achievements system.
We were replicating behavior across multiple projects and that’s a strong alert to when you should think about doing (or buying) an editor extension.
With that in mind, we put all the knowledge we had about achievements into a powerful and extensible plugin and came up with our own Achievements Service Manager.
It works on any platform and makes the whole achievement creation and managing process a breeze. As expected, it already saved us countless hours of work and I’m sure it can help you as well.
That said, remember that if you want to retain your players for as long as possible on your game, achievements have to be part of your game! It’s not by chance that Mickey Blumental’s article on 10 ways to retain your players has achievements as the first point.
Now stop reading this and go and get all those platinum achievements!