The Unity Asset Store

There were once many different companies that offered packages of Unity-ready materials and models that you could license for use in your games. Unity consolidated them under one roof in their online Unity Asset Store. To access the store, open Unity 3D and navigate to Window | Asset Store. Here are a few stand-out innovations that have seen a lot of use in the Unity community:

2DToolkit: Prior to the release of Unity 4.3, creating 2D games in Unity was tough, but not impossible. Packages like 2DToolkit provided sprite sheet and texture packing systems to ease 2D development.

NGUI: Another very popular package is NGUI, which does a great deal of GUI heavy lifting for you, using a more user-friendly system than Unity's built-in immediate mode GUI.

playMaker: This snap-together system provides LEGO-like behavior blocks that you can link together; no programming required.

Asset packs: There is a vast number of asset packages with everything from modeled airplanes to medieval dungeons that you can use to prototype your games. I strongly urge you to use whatever help you can to get your game finished. Paying $30 to save yourself months of work isn't cheating—it's just using your head. If it comes down to a choice between paying a few bucks and never finishing your game, it's time to break open your piggy bank.

The cats over at Unity Technologies aren't stupid. If they see a certain tool performing very well on the Unity Asset Store, it's a safe bet that they're planning to add it to a future release of Unity. That's why tools like NGUI and 2DToolkit see less use as their popularity peaks: Unity recreates or even hires the creators of these systems to improve their core product!