Thoughts on Level 11

July is the 5th month that Level 11 has been offered to Pro users. Here's what we've seen offered for free from Level 11 along with current price and current number of reviews to gauge popularity:

March

• Playmaker - $65, 2024 reviews, 5 star
• Tyra - $20, 22 reviews, 4 star
• White Oak Package - $39, 44 reviews, 4 star
• Sci-Fi Grenades - $15, 18 reviews, 4 star

April

• Edy's Vehicle Physics - $60, 274 reviews, 5 star
• plyGame - $45, 225 reviews, 4 star
• ProMouse - $20, 27 reviews, 4 star

May

• Custom Handles - $15, 28 reviews, 5 star
• Fireball Prefabs - $5, 17 reviews, 4 star
• Cinema Pro Cams - $50, 42 reviews, 5 star
• HipFilters - $30, 25 reviews , 4 star

June

• Indian Tribal Totem Set - $15, 8 reviews, 4 star
• Alloy Detail Texture Mega Pack - $20, 25 reviews, 4 star
• Fantasy Mobile UI - $10, 18 reviews, 4 star
• Fluvio Standard - $75, 26 reviews, 4 star

July

• uRecord - $30, 28 reviews, 4 star
• Hidden Object Game Template - $20, 13 reviews, 5 star
• Ferr SuperCube - $20, 16 reviews, 5 star
• 2D Mine Tileset - $20, 10 reviews, 5 star

August [added after original post]

• Galactic Adventure Music Pack 1 - $35, 4 reviews, 5 star
• iGUI Basic - $15, 29 reviews, 4 star [NOTE: upgrade to iGUI costs extra $55]
• uScript Basic - $35, 3 reviews, 5 star [NOTE: upgrade to uScript Pro costs extra $155]
• Cubemapper 2 Reflection Suite - $20, 78 reviews, 5 star

September

• uIntelliSense - $10, 133 reviews, 5 star
• Advanced FPS Counter - $10, 131 reviews, 5 star
• Extreme Sewer kit - $25, 6 reviews, 4 star
• Wordpress User Data - $20, 13 reviews, 5 star

October

• Complete Soomla Template - $15, 5 reviews, 4 star
• Dungeon Level Kit - $30, 7 reviews, 4 star
• Fragmented Objects - $15, 12 reviews, 4 star
• SECTR AUDIO - $50, 10 reviews, 5 star

Keep in mind that the price and reviews are a current snapshot - not what they were when they were featured.

It started out with a some great products like Playmaker and Edy's Vehicle Physics. plyGame looks fairly popular but not something I would use.

Free users, are you planning on subscribing to Level 11 when it is available?
What are you hoping to get out of Level 11?
Pro users, what are your thoughts on the assets offered so far?

Edit: added items for August.
Edit: added items for September.
Edit: added items for October.

 

At the rate things are going I'll have everything I'm interested in before we're able to subscribe to it.

 

At the rate things have gone I already have everything I'm interested in before they show up for free in Level 11.

...

You didn't list the stuff that was on sale for Level 11 each month. Some of those assets were ones I was waiting for a sale to buy, so that was nice.

I don't know how they choose which assets to put into Level 11 (I read before that they try for a mix of asset types and genres) but it would be cool if they did some sort of aggregation of what Pro users actually have in our wish lists.

...

I wonder how they are going to deal with repeating free assets in Level 11.

As new people get Pro or subscribe to Level 11, a lot of them might want some of the assets that were free in prior months.

But that's not entirely fair to people who've been in Level 11 from the start.

It's an interesting problem that I'm glad is not mine to solve.

 

We already had everything in those lists that we wanted, except Edy's Vehicle Physics. So overall, not too impressed with the selection so far. Playmaker was a good choice even though we already had it.

Yes we did buy a couple sale items too, so that's a bonus.

I hope to see uScript and other cool stuff we don't have sometime soon.

 

it's getting worse every month. after my free months run out I won't paying for this service. They're giving away stuff that has no value.

 

Though on this note Playmaker goes on sale pretty frequently. I picked it up a while back for $45 which is cheaper than Level 11 offered it.

 

I don't have that information. Plus it would've made the post too long.

I picked up a few useful items through the Level 11 sale too, so that was nice for me too. I was thinking, they could probably make more money off of us by rotating the discount section twice a month instead of once a month. If I didn't want to buy it in the first 2 weeks, I probably won't be buying it the last 2 weeks either. So get new sales in and take more of my money. That is assuming they have enough sellers wanting to participate in the sales.

 

Level 11 has provided me very close to zero value.

If they want it to provide value they need to make sure that at least one or two of the free items has good general utility.

For example:
- qhierarchy would b a great offering as free instead of on sale. This is a handy general utility.
- ultimate bloom would have been great, this is an improved camera effect. Almost any project could use it.

I picked up playmaker and plygame since they were free. I have no real interest in them, but I always wondered how they worked and maybe eventually I will take a look at them.

Part of the thing is that a lot of the stuff being offered for free just doesn't make sense as a pro user. Like, if you're paying for pro - are you really going to be interested in Hidden Object Game or Fireball prefab or 2d Mine Tileset?

 

I liked the deals so far even though some of the free ones I had already bought long before (ex. Edy's Vehicle Physics and Playmaker). Some of the paid deals I got too. They were just too good to pass up, like UI Builder. The paid deals this month aren't anything that I would need though. But I'm sure others might. You can't please everyone.

It was free on Level 11. You can't get any cheaper than that.

 

I get them because they're free and generally pretty cool stuff but they just go on the shelf. I haven't used anything Level 11 has offered.

I think it has very limited appeal. I guess the idea was "offer enough free stuff over the year to equal the price of a pro license" but honestly any one person will only be interested in actually using like 2 or 3 of the things offered. In other words, the free stuff and sales do not apply to everyone and this directly reduces its value to the point that it is not useful at all.

The only reason someone buys pro now is to get rid of the splash screen. I guess if you buy pro to get rid of the splash screen then its nice getting the free box of random stuff that you may or may not be interested in each month, but still.

 

I'm a pro user (not who your question is directed to) however I'm going to answer it anyways... because I was that >.< close to asking for a refund but I convinced myself that the Level 11 would 'be worth' the Pro fee, and then I'd also have the couple of tiny perks pro gets you also.

Now we are a few months in and I've been able to see what value I'm getting out of it.

So .. for me certainly I've downloaded any of the free packages that look remotely like I might consider using them one day - but so far there has been only one package that I both did not have, and ended up using in a current project and that is Cinema Pro Cams.

Ironically I would never have purchased it - the descriptions made it sound as if it was something that I didn't need!

However I gave it a try and was pleasantly surprised - I had been having some camera problems that I couldn't get quite perfect; I was way too deep trying to solve other problems so I was just living with it ; and Cinema Pro Cams instantly solved them while making my game look just a tad more realistic in a rendering/camera sense.

That one pleasant surprise aside my general thoughts are:

- over time we are seeing more low value assets show up reducing the perceived value of Level 11 (NOTE: Whatever "low value" means to you is important in this context. For me about half the assets each month are 'low value' to me meaning they have no value at all to me personally that I can see for the current or future. So over a 12 month period if I perceive half the assets have been no value to me then that reduces the perceived value of Level 11 by about 50%)

- the random nature of what shows up greatly reduces its perceived value (the chance that you'll get what you need but haven't yet purchased is very low )

- some of the items that go on 'sale' aren't as good as other sales that have shown up on the regular store again reducing the perceived value of Level 11

- I'm highly concerned about asset recycling in this paid for service would greatly reduce the perceived value of Level 11 (Example: I already owned Playmaker; and they gave it away once already; if they give it away again that means they are acting as if they gave me $130 but they really gave me an effective $0)

I'm sure I could think of a few more but I'm low on coffee so I'll end the criticism train here for now.

peace

 

That's a great idea!

 

This is a great point. It explains the thread where people are upset that they cannot subscribe to Level 11 yet.

 

I have grabbed each free Level 11 asset as they came available for free, but I have not used any of them in a project. I grabbed Playmaker in March only because it was free, even though I have no interest in ever using it. I did not even download it yet. NOTE: I have nothing against Playmaker; I just strongly prefer using C# instead of a visual coding alternative.

With Playmaker specifically, Unity should have bought that tech and integrated it into Unity 5 for all users. That way Unity would have an official alternative to UE4's Blueprint. That would have some sway with new users, especially non-programmers. Giving Playmaker to Unity 5 Pro users in March did not address the issue the same way. Pro users that can program don't need or want Playmaker, and Pro users that did need Playmaker most likely already bought it.

I don't understand why "Hidden Object Game Template" was a Level 11 free item for Pro users. I'm too busy working on my own project to waste time piddling around with a free template like that one. That template seems geared toward new users. I have to assume most Pro users felt the same way when that got announced as one of the free Level 11 assets this month.

Some of the discounted assets through Level 11 have been more compelling, but those still cost something. Even without Level 11, many of those discounted assets would have eventually gone on sale.

 

Kinda. Would be good for Unity to have *something* official, but Playmaker in particular isn't really as powerful as Blueprint. It's too focused (FSM only) and bending it to do *everything* gets really cumbersome for some things. If they were to buy and integrate NodeCanvas, Universe, Blox or possibly uScript I'd fully agree. Playmaker has the most tutorials, but it's not the most powerful at all.

 

Good to know. I have not used Playmaker, so I did not realize the shortcomings of it.

 

I think thats the real two main points here.

1. People already have the stuff they need because they aren't going to sit around waiting for it to go on sale/free and that fact almost single handedly makes the entire Level 11 system pointless.
2. Stuff that does go out for free or sale doesn't really apply to the people with Pro licenses mainly because of point #1 but also because of the really weird choices of things like Hidden Object Game Template which is already a super niche template and very unlikely that anyone with a Pro license would be interested in.

However its not really fair to assume that everyone with a pro license wants the same stuff. There are a lot of art assets that Pro licenses holders would probably be interested in because of their projects and/or goals while other Pro users would much rather see practical tools like Shader Forge, Substance Designer, Final IK, Apex Path, Terrain Composer or something along those lines.

Either way, the first point seems to be the primary issue to me. Level 11 is like the free mints you get when leaving a restaurant at lunch. Everybody likes mints, but chances are you don't really care.

 

It would be really cool if, instead of the free assets, they gave us an asset store credit in the $30-$50 range that we could decide how to spend.

 

That would be pretty sick, but I doubt that will happen.

 

To give a little context: I'm by no means a professional game developer with loads of experience. We just work on games in our spare time, earning a livelihood through other means for the meantime. But everyone in our team has at least a bachelors degree in their relative field (computer science, game design, etc.) so we're not totally clueless. We can do most things we want to do but it just takes some more time because of a lack of experience with Unity, etc. which ends up in a lot of research time.
Anyway, that's how I see it as a professional software developer that just tries to get into seriously making games:

Some assets were really nice, especially in the beginning. Since we haven't been using Unity intensively for all that long, not everyone had them. But all in all I feel like it got worse and worse

For me there were 3 kinds of free assets provided through lv11:

1. Assets I can use in nearly any project
Especially things like Playmaker or the Custom Handles look really nice. I don't think I'll be needing them all that much myself as I do most things with scripts. But it will certainly help me in providing useful tools and an easier workflow for the people that put together the game in the editor and have a bit less of a technical background. It's great to know they won't have to spend as much time waiting for me to extend scripts (or even messing around in them theirselves) and with the handles I can give them some visual feedback that helps them tweak stuff without having to just mess around with numbers in the editor. What's even better is that I can use those in nearly any project!

2. Assets I don't really need right now but that I can probably make some use of somewhere down the line
We're mainly talking Edy's Vehicle Physics here. It looks great and seems like providing a feature (good car physics) that Unity doesn't. I'm not working on a game needing cars right now but I don't have any trouble imaging a lot of different games that need them.
Fluvio would have made the list if it was the pro version. I know that that one is 200$ and can understand that that's too valuable for giving it out for free but what am I to do with the standard version? I don't absolutely need the source code of the pro version but the standard version doesn't have Unity native compute shader support and if I'm concerned about anything concerning physics then it's performance. If I was to use this asset in a project, I'd probably have to upgrade to pro for 125$ which makes Fluvio standard feel more like a discount on the real product instead of a free asset

3. Assets too niche or simple
E.g. the tribal totems looked nice in my opinion but how often were you thinking "oh, I need totems for my game!". That's just way too specific of an asset to be of any use to a significant percentage of pro users I'd say.
Then there's stuff like the Hidden Object Game Template or the fireball prefabs. It isn't that they're low quality or anything. But like others pointed out, they're just assets that most probably aren't of any use to a pro user. If you're prepared to shell out as much as you do for Unity Pro you probably mean business and don't need assets containing stuff that you could very easily do yourself.


What I'd wish for:
I'd like more assets that I can potentially use in every or at least a lot of games. Ironically (and maybe very purposefully those assets were often those just discounted). I'm thinking of stuff like

- Shader Forge
- QHierarchy
- Ultimate Bloom
- Substance Painter
- Suimono (granted, not usable in every project but Unity is just very, very lacking in the water department in my opinion and there are quiet a few games out there you might want to have some more feature rich water for)
- etc

I know that a lot of the tools I listed are probably already owned by most pro users but maybe Unity could do something like giving you 3-5$ worth of store credit for every lv11 "free asset" you already own? As things stand now and if I had to pay 19$/month I'd be far better of just putting aside those 19$ every month and thus get 228$ a year I can spend on assets I really want. Further (don't have the time to search it again but a Unity employee definitely said this in the forums) you can quit your Level 11 subscription on a monthly basis. Since you keep your assets after quitting Level 11 I'll be far better of just buying it for a month if I get more than 19$ out of it which I would have done only once (for Playmaker) or maaaybe twice out of this 5 months.

To be honest, I somehow regret not asking for a refund when I had the chance. Level 11 sounded a bit like an apology to those who bought Unity 5 pro and I was expecting a bit more out of it (although I know I'm not entitled to anything and Unity didn't make any promises - so that's my fault). Now that the free version has all technical features that pro does we're not limited in any way development wise and until we have something we have a game big and good enough to need pro, I assume that at least Unity 6 or maybe even 7 will be out. If I could go back in time and knew what Level 11 has in store, I'd most definitely go for the refund. As things stand now I paid a pro license for a dark skin, no splash screen and maybe 80$ worth of assets I can really use.

 

QHierarchy and Ultimate Bloom are actually in the current Level11 sale!

 

Also, it would be cool if an asset we buy happens to go into L11 within 30 days, we automatically get a store credit for the purchase.

I know that at the end of each month, I start to hold off on buying assets because I want to see if they end up in the L11 sale.

 

I think he wants them in the "free" column of L11.

 

Yes, that's what I meant. Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear enough. But thanks for the hint! Appreciated anyway

 

Ha, same. Unless something becomes the daily deal, I have no interest in buying it in the latter part of the month. I really like L11 and I know that eventually I'll get my money back in freebies and discounts. I just wish that everything that is discounted was perfect for my list of projects.

Also on the main theme of the thread: I think some people are worrying about L11 prematurely.

 

Why do you say that?

 

Level 11 is included with pro but paid extra for anyone else so there is a mix of users that Unity has to consider.

I wish for two things as far as level 11 goes.

1) Unity mines level 11 users wish lists or
2) Unity gives level 11 users some way to vote on possible entries

Of course if asset providers do not wish to participate then we will never see those packages appear but having some actual input into the process would make this feel more like a paid for service then a lottery.

 

Well they didn't mine my wishlist this month.

 

Self-quote from another thread:

 

The August offerings are sub-par

In my opinion music should not really be a Level 11 free asset. Why? Because unlike most assets which can be tailored by us developers specifically for our games (such as scripts, or graphical assets), music is bound to sound the same no matter what game it is deployed in. This leads to many games with music sounding exactly the same, which might be good for extremely low-budget games looking for a quick turnaround, but not good for anyone making a serious game in any way.

And two of the other free assets for this month's offerings on Level 11 are not even the full assets, requiring the user to pay extra for their full versions. Not impressed in the slightest there.

 

Can't be tailored? Technically there are complete music genres based on sampling

 

I agree that August's free assets are a let down. And I understand your point about music packs in general, but this music pack is a little different.

I have some experience with @mlamanna's music packs (I own almost all of them).

He includes what he calls "stems", which are separate tracks for each instrument. This allows you to do a lot of really cool mixing to create a very custom score for your game. You can add and remove instruments to build and release tension to coincide with player progression.

He explains this, with a demo here.

I just wanted to point this out for the Level 11 members so that they don't completely disregard this pack.

I think the intent for the Level 11 feature came from a good place and I hope the powers that be at Unity take our feedback into consideration to re-invent it into something a little more useful for Pro level developers.

 

Thanks for the feedback on me

 

And I understand what you guys are talking about with music being in the level 11, I just ask please not to down star me because of that.

 

Wow, did anyone do that? That's not cool.

 

Michael, your pack is excellent. I don't think anybody would take it down a star on the rating simply because of the feelings toward Level 11.

 

@mlamanna I went to drop 5 stars to the music pack now since it was actually the only useful one of the free ones for me and the loops were actually good

Note that I also went to listen most of the other music packs after I downloaded it week or two ago and marked some of the other sets for possible future use in other projects (probably would have not found/searched without Lvl11).

 

Thanks everyone !!

 

I have my fingers crossed that they will announce a revamp to L11 at Unite, later this month.

 

Added September's items to the original post.

uIntelliSense is really nice but cheap anyway.
I'm not really sure what the advantage is of using Advanced FPS Counter over the built-in profiler.

 

uIntelliSense is indeed very nice and you can see that a lot of polish went into its development. On top of that it's not as niche as e.g. the totem poles and something that a lot of people could probably get some use out of. Just a pity that (in my opinion at least) UnityVS covers most of what uIntelliSense does - unless I missed something, that is.

All in all not super thrilled with this month but I'm glad to see we didn't end up with one or multiple basic versions of assets (of which you'd have to buy the more expensive version to get something useful) like we did in June and August.

 

True, UnityVS has gotten much better lately. But uIntelliSense still does a better job at parsing the documentation and includes information such as function parameter descriptions. This XML documentation available on github is also an option with a quality level somewhere between UnityVS and uIntelliSense.

 

Not too happy with the way Level 11 is going. It started with assets that were relatively expensive and made me feel that somehow sticking to Pro was a good idea, but now the most expensive asset this month is $25. If you want the WordPress User Data asset, then you need to buy the WordPress User Login Kit, which is $30. The Extreme Sewer Kit gives a warning that the asset is for Unity 4. We are supposed to be Unity 5 Pro users, why are we given an asset that has not being designed for Unity 5?

I love Unity and I believe in supporting the company by sticking to Pro. I had already purchased the most interesting assets (for me) offered on Level 11, and there were a couple of new ones that made me quite happy. I even bought some of the ones that were discounted, but the way the asset selection is going is not really making me feel very Pro, unfortunately.

 

Thing is though.

Level 11 is one feature among very many features. If this was any more powerful, it probably would fall in the area of being the sole reason to spend $1500.

 

Can't speak for others but to me (and I imagine a lot of people making less than 100k$/year) it nearly is. At least apart from the dark skin (which indeed is really nice and fits so well with the VS dark theme ).

Even for me as a hobbyist game programmer, working as a "normal" software developer during the day, Unity 4 Pro felt totally worth it because features like "render to texture", the profiler or occlusion culling were adding a ton of value for probably nearly everyone serious enough to shell out 1500$.
Now that we get all the engine functionality for free, at least 90% of what made the pro version "worth it" for me suddenly have vanished.

Of course this is an interesting move and a great thing for a lot of developers. But I think it really mad Unity Pro a lot less compelling for many a small time fish and we now can't completely shake the expectation to get the same amount of value (from our perspective) we got from Unity 4 Pro in Unity 5 Pro as well, which might express itself in unrealistic expectations to what Level11 could and should be.

I said it before: Unity didn't promise anything and it's my fault for assuming this. But for me it just felt like "Hey guys, we know a lot of you already bought Unity 5 Pro for the functionality you'll get and now you could also get this functionality for free. We'll give you your money back if you want too but you can also still keep it and we'll add stuff like Level 11 to make it still worth your money!". I'd again like to empathize that this really is my fault and no promises were broken or anything by Unity. I just got hyped a bit too much and now feel somehow disappointed because my (unreasonable) expectations were not quiet met.

Maybe Unity Pro just isn't for people like me anymore? What I'd love to see is the possibility to buy specific perks/features. I personally don't get my moneys worth out of Unity Pro at the moment, but I'll gladly pay just pay 100-200$ to get rid of the splash screen and get access to the dark skin. Unity Pro Light/Unity Pro Indie or whatever you'd like to call it.

 

Well with feature parity here, what would you want Unity to do? What else could they offer?

 

Asset store items given for free make sense when it is quality tools or quality 3D models, music, otherwise you'll get items that are not the best in their category.

Are you using Pro mainly for Asset Store stuff given to you for free ?
Because you will spare more money butying some items you need instead of paying for Pro, and when you start a project you already know what items you need, so you won't wait until some of them randomly are given for free.
Pro version interest is elsewhere , Asset Store items should be considered as a bonus only.

 

Many features? There is one feature, custom splash screens. That's the only feature of Pro. Everything was given to free users and financed by Pro users.

 

Agreed, the splash screen seems to be only one and everything else are or will be available at subscription and depending what you need it will be also cheaper. Pro user with one or 3 platforms purchased (3x1500) does not even get unlimited time on other services till next major release like cloud build and is limited to 12 months so after that you will probably have to pay $300-900 extra for the remaining months depending what services you started to use. No gain in Level 11 either. This is so far but I assume it stays and multiplayer, analytics etc will be the same thing in pricing.

At least on mobile platforms you don't gain any advantage so it's splash screen only.

 

Dark skin. Regardless of its real value there are many who want to see it moved to Free.