What would be some good assets for my game?

I'm gunna try to make a game, and thinking about the systems I'll need I came up with these.

*Dialogue system between characters (like a linear visual novel where it saves throughout)
*Story progress & Save system for account (saves progress throughout game, saves high scores)
*like a mini rpg between characters / events that happen in game
*score system...
*multiple story path system
i.e. you can choose to go down one path / story, but can always start others, they save independtly of eachother

*video recording system, picture taking system
or like
coding a system, where the player can place different cameras, and start recording, and a button system where they can switch between them while recording, and it saves as a video file afterwards (lol....)

*item shop system (person spends money for monthly new items if they want)
*Notification system (of new updates / events / items)
*unlock system (unlock things as you progress, go back and view them / go to place ingame from menu anytime)
*menu system
(that goes into game scenes and lets you play them, then back to menu, saving progress / score)


I wanna release it on steam and smartphones, and have it have an online connection system for updates/account/progress/scores but not require it to play the game.



I have no coding experience. I'm a 3D Animator/Artist. How many years am I about to waste doing this? lol Anybody recommend assets that would speed it up or have these systems almost done already?

I know there's a dialogue and save system on asset store already, not sure about others, and I have to think about the structure of putting everything together, seems very complicated. Like there's infinite ways you could put all of these systems together once you create them, but many of those ways could be very inefficient / cause errors within eachother... Am I thinking too big here? lol

 

Using many different assets will bring you more trouble, than benefits. Specially if you have no programming experience.

I strongly suggest, try to write your own, or use existing assets to learn and disect, how they work. Then make sure, you can use and fix them when times come.

But if you start depending purely on assets, soon you will run into the mess. You will have mixed folder organisation. You will have different coding styles. And risking potential issues with conflicts and compatibility issues. Bug fixing will be nightmare, when decide use later Unity version and something get broken. Asset often stop getting supported, with later Unity versions, than they were made for.

You won't be able completely to skip the programming part of your project.

But you need be capable of taking control over the project and used assets. So yes, be careful which assets you decide to use.

They can easily be your money grab.

 

When it comes to coding assets I think you should be careful. Especially for systems that are tightly integrated into your domain. It's often better to code these yourself.

We have used some code assets, like final IK, node canvas, project acoustics, etc. These have tight abstractions and could "easily" be replaced by something else if wanted.

 

I was thinking more about it, and it does seem like it'd be confusing as heck, and I may be thinking too big in terms of a game for my first game, way too many systems lol

Can I ask you though, what do you think of bolt for writing code? I am more node experinced (houdini, shaders, vfx graph) but have yet to touch a node based coding system.

Unity recently includes it as their official visual scripting?

Would writing functions in that be better than relying on asset store c# scripts? (I only learned basic c# and forgot most of syntax lol)

 

I never used bolt. Not ever tempting.
I am not aware of it being official. Is free on asset store, so you can give it a spin.

Only visual scripting in Unity I use, is shader graph so far, as I don't have auto completion for shaders.
But with Visual Studio, you got that. So it guides you, when you make any mistake writing C# code.
Plus you have tons of materials, tutorials, docs forum etc. Fast step to learn.
I think with bolt, you will be pretty much on your own, with any problem. However, probably they got some community somewhere.

No matter what you going to use, C# or Visual Scripting, you need to learn their functions, logic, and applied math.
Mind, learning bolt is not really transferable skill in my view.
Learning C#, you learn multiple skills regarding programming. Much easier later to learn other languages. Very transferable. Sure is long way to learn, but is also, for any visual scripting.

If had to use visual scripting, for main core mechanics, I would perhaps consider look into Unreal and their blueprints.

Sorry, but I don't know.

This is good opportunity, to brush it off, and get into learning.
We got great community, keen to help. And as I already mentioned, there are tons of resources to learn and read from.

Probably. Nothing unusual. Consider start from feature prototype. Can you make something happen. Something to do with a ray. Or collision. Can you make basics UI etc. Start small. Very small.

 

I'm not a fan of writing everything from scratch but let's make something clear, just because you buy an asset for dialogue, saving, etc. won't save you from having to code. At some point you'll have to call those systems to do something or interact with each other, worse they could have problems and you'll have to dive into their source codes to fix them.

You don't want to waste time? learning to code is never a waste of time, buying a lot of assets and then making a mess of a project that will only frustrate you seems more like a waste of time (and money) to me.