We have been working for mobile games in Unity for 8+ years. Throughout these years, we purchased and tried a variety of plugins in the Unity Assets Store. Today I’m here to share the list of some essential plugins that can hopefully make the lives of mobile game devs easier.

We are somehow shopaholic in Unity’s asset store, purchased 600+ assets. 😃

Easy Mobile Pro ($79)

First of all, Easy Mobile Pro (EMP) provides almost all required features in mobile platforms, such as in-app-purchase, leaderboards, achievements and local notifications. We recently migrated from Prime31 plugins and we were pretty happy about the decision. Prime31 is great and provides a lot of integration on mobile features too, until Easy Mobil Pro came out with the all-in-one solution with the dev-friendly inspector, while Prime31 has only 2 years license period but EMP’s is life-time.

Easy Save 3 ($59)

For some simple games PlayerPrefs may be enough for progress saving, but using binary serialization can be much beneficial in most cases. Easy Save 3 (ES3) provides all the functions on file saving, such as encryption, autosave, custom type serialization, etc. Another use case is that we can sync the bytes from the save file to game services such as Game Center and Google Play Games, using EMP, so players can get their progress back from re-installation, without setting up a server for storing the progress. We use ES3 to save all important data in players’ progress, but still using PlayerPrefs on less important data such as settings and shop page index.

Anti-Cheat Toolkit ($50)

Although there’s almost no way to prevent hacking, especially for offline causal games, Anti-Cheat Toolkit (ACT) deliveries fruitful features to make hacking harder without much effort on development. Although we haven’t even used all its functionalities, the most frequently used features are the Obscured Types and Time Cheating Detector. That makes it harder to change in-game numbers using hacking apps, such as Lucky Patch, or changing the system time just for getting rewards without a cooldown. If you’re developing an offline causal game, we strongly recommend you to protect your game with ACT, which probably only cost you an hour or two.

I2 Localization ($45)

Localizing your game can help you get featured in app stores and go to the global market. I2 is the best and probably the only localization solution in Unity. The greatest feature it provides is the Google spreadsheet sync, so you can few people can co-work in the translation sheet and push the live translation update to your players anytime. It also supports a bunch of UI plugins and localizing the app display name.

Sound Manager Pro 3 (Free)

Although this asset has not been updated since 2015, it’s still the best solution for audio and there’s no replacement (we tried). It provides sound pooling, shuffles playing, crossfading, etc. Due to the absence of maintenance, there are quite a few codes are depreciated. We really wish the author can come back and maintain it someday.

Pool Manager 5 ($24.95)

Performance is always the crucial key in mobile devices, PoolManager can manage massed assets, such as bullets, props and even particles in-game. You can set up all parameters such as how many instances of the assets to keep, preloading the prefab, etc.

Megacool (Free)

As we mentioned before, Megacool let your players share their game-play in GIF, and you can develop a simple referral system. This can increase the player engagement and organic growth of your game without spending any marketing budget.

Yodo1 MAS (Free)

Instead of just a plugin, MAS is actually an ad service for monetization in games. After finishing the game, it’s important to think about the monetization. As we described previously, although it’s very easy to setup UnityAds in Unity, using multiple ad platforms can maximize the income of the game. MAS provides easy integration and excellent support, so you can pretty much start earning after one or two days of integration.

That’s all the must-have plugins we believe. The list may go larger as we continue making different genres of games with new gaming technologies.