Building Core Tools In Unity

I've been buying assets left and right, only to find them to be too convoluted and bloated. A first person shooter kit off the asset store, had like over 100 scripts (which a few were redundant), but ran very well. The biggest issue I had was getting it to play nice with an AI asset I bought. No integration was given by either dev, and the dev of the FPS asset clearly stated in his discord that it was written too differently to be an easy integration.

That got me thinking. We buy these assets thinking we are getting solid code, and we are. It's just that they don't always play nice with other assets and we end up making our own solutions.

Because we normally end up rolling our own code, the best thing we can do with other assets is to either:

1. Accept them as-is or,

2. Learn from them or,

3. Use them sparingly

For an asset like Gaia or Atlas, I tend to use it as-is. I'm not going to build my own terrain generator. For an asset like the RPG Creation Kit, I'll probably mostly learn from it, same with FPS kits and third-person kits. For other assets, like IK footing or placement, I'll probably use them sparingly depending on the project and need. I won't always need them, so they fit in a more niche category.

So what does that mean for me? I suppose it means I'll stay a gameplay programmer for Unity and add tools development to that role. I really wish I had a team right about now...