In this article we are going to talk about some awesome tools from the Unity Asset store to quickly build your survival game or variation of a survival game. We know a lot of you have been searching for an efficient way to make your survival game with Unity 3D. The Unity Asset store is a place where you can get some of the best tools to complete your game. With over 100,000 game ready assets to choose from, you should have no problem building your game.
Let's talk about survival games.
ARK: Survival Evolved, a steam survival game that has over 11,000,000 players. The premise of the game is that you are stranded on an island full of new and never before seen creatures. One of the stand up features of the game is that fact that dinosaurs roam this island
Then you have Rust, an apocalyptic survival game made by Facepunch studios. Here is a fun fact for all you rust fans out there. Did you know that Rust was made with the Unity 3D engine? Yeah that is right, Rust studios Facepunch used Unity 5 to develop their game, Rust is a good example of a game utilizing the Unity engine and asset store to find success. Rust stands out from the crowd with the use of the procedural generated maps system, crafting system, building system and use real world survival mechanics.
A lot of indie developers are starting to develop their own survival games now targeting mobile devices such as iPhone and Android. We talk to some of these small indie developers and ask what they are using to develop their games. Most of them pointed us to a few key survival game engines that you can download from the unity asset store. Below is a list of the best Unity Asset store tools to develop your survival game and the mechanics.
Photon Multiplayer system
The Photon Multiplayer system is one of the best tools on the asset store. It allows you to easily create multiplayer games for any platform including mobile, desktop, consoles (including Playstation, Xbox & Nintendo Switch), TV, VR, AR & web. This is a must if you are creating a multiplayer survival game. Photon comes with very detailed documentation and example tutorials. It’s also cross platform. So if you want your PC gamers to play with your Xbox or PS4/5 to play together it is 100% possible! Photon also uses the cloud to guarantee low latency. They also have an awesome team that monitors servers 24/7. This makes it easy for developers to scale up operations as the game grows. And best of all Photon is free!
uSurvival a survival game engine for Unity 3D
Next up we have the best selling Tool uSurvival, one of the best survival game engines on the market. Putting together survival game mechanics can be a daunting task for any indie developer or small studio, but uSurvival makes it easy to get past that and streamline your development. The engine comes with pre-made characters and controls including running, jumping, swimming, climbing, crouching, crawling, sliding, fighting combat and much more. The camera system makes it so you can easily set up a third person and first person camera or both depending on your game. You get a lot of scriptable items including potions, health food and you can
customize them all depending on your game play mechanics. You will get a weapons system that you can customize to your needs and you can add as many weapons systems as you want. The crafting system is also easy to use and streamlined. You can set the values to make crafting on items easy or harder, this will include a cooking system as well. The next system you will get is the harvesting system. This will allow you to set any item to be harvested depending on your game. For example, chopping down trees for wood, mining minerals is already set up in the uSurvival engine. The build system is very streamlined and easy to use and already built in. Your players can use the build systems to build structures such as walls, house’s forts and much more. All of these systems can be modified for your game design needs. Lastly they use SQLite for databases. You can also convert to MySQL also. You can download uSurvival here
Next Up we have the Easy Build System V5
Easy Build System V5 is another Unity 3D tool that lets you build structures similar to the Fortnite games. This lets you build structures and walls right out the box. The Easy Build System V5 is a valuable asset for its ease of use. Build anything with any type of 3D mesh. This can be easily integrated with uSurvival system and more. The Easy Build System V5 comes with loads of tutorials and documentations to get you started. Click here to download the Easy Build System V5
Next is a new product called Inventory Engine Pro.
Inventory Engine Pro is an inventory system that uses JSON data base. It's a simple easy to use system for crafting equipment, storage and of course player inventory. Everything is streamlined and customizable with c#. Inventory Engine Pro allows you to drag and drop items, collect items crafting, throwing away items and save player preferences. Be sure to check out their demo to see examples. You can download Inventory Engine Pro here.
Abandoned Post Apocalyptic City Pack
Abandoned Post Apocalyptic City Pack was one of the most useful assets we have used. We used it for a post-apocalyptic racing game we built for a company overseas and it worked out great! The assets come with 270 models and prefabs that you can use for your game. The kit also comes with a number of modular assets also. This includes tree, bushes, grass, buildings, cars abandoned buildings and much much more. Working with the Abandoned Post Apocalyptic City Pack gave me a preview of what our world would look like 2 years for now. You will get that feeling too when using these assets to populate your survival game. You can download the Pack here.
Tropical Environment Assets.
If you are designing a ARK: Survival Evolved style game then you are going to need some nice tropical jungle environments. The best looking asset so far are the Alien Fantasy Forest from Manufactura K4. They make some of the best looking assets on the Unity asset store. Be sure to download Alien Fantasy Forest with the link here
Mobile Environment Assets.
If you are interested in developing a Ark Style environment for mobile devices be sure to check out The Low Poly Rainforest Pack. It's a low poly optimized tropical jungle kit.
The trees and plants range from 76 Triangle to 1840 triangles and they include LODS. Since you are developing for mobile you might want to optimize the textures from 4096 x 4096 to about 1024 x 1024 depending on your game. But otherwise this is a great asset to build survival games with. You can download those assets here.
If you are looking for assets geared towards mobile devices check out RPG/FPS Game Assets for PC/Mobile (Industrial Set v7.0). This is optimized for game designers who are specifically targeting mobile devices like Android and iPhone. Check out the reviews from this asset. The environment kit also comes with loads of assets and textures to complete your mobile survival game. You can check out the list of some of the prefabs you get below. You can check out the kits in more detail here.
Conclusion
We love survival games and will be working on one in the future using these assets. We hope that we pointed you in the right direction for creating your game. This is perfect for hobbyist and serious game designers who are trying to figure out how to make a survival game with unity 3D. Are you looking to create a cyberpunk style environment? Check out our tutorial on how to create a cyberpunk world here with Unity 3D. Want to show off your work? Join our discord and show everyone what you are working on.
