The workshop.

Position

Most Unity Asset Store plugins ship like prototypes and get sold like infrastructure. The result is a graveyard of v1.0 listings abandoned in 2018, with three open GitHub issues and a "developer no longer responds" note in the reviews. Avanatro Tools is the counter-position: assets engineered until they are boring, supported by the author who wrote them, and built to outlast the next Unity LTS.

No subscriptions. No funded roadmap. No VC pressure. The output is slow on purpose, because a Unity plugin shipped under those constraints tends to look like a product instead of a deliverable.

Method

• 01

  Tests before listings.

  Each plugin ships with a dotnet-NUnit suite that runs without Unity, in CI, before the Asset Store ever sees a .unitypackage. The behaviour is pinned by tests, not by hopeful prose in the documentation.

• 02

  Zero hard dependencies.

  No UniRx, no Zenject, no Odin, no Quartz. Every plugin drops into a vanilla Unity 2021.3 LTS project. IProvider interfaces are already there when you need to swap a backend, so the fork stays optional.

• 03

  Boring failure modes, solved first.

  Crash-safety, schema migration, concurrency, path-traversal: figured out before the listing goes live. Two weeks of QA per release. No "v1.1 will fix it" placeholders.

• 04

  Schema migration as a default.

  When a save format changes, the prior version is mirrored automatically before any conversion runs. Rolling back a broken migration is a one-line call, not a postmortem.

• 05

  Provider-pattern over god classes.

  Swap serializers, storage, encryption, path resolvers. Independent surfaces, all four IProvider interfaces. No fork required when the project needs a different backend.

• 06

  Editor tools that disappear.

  If a plugin adds a custom Editor window or wizard, it never autostarts, never opens unprompted, and uninstalls cleanly. The Editor menu stays under Tools/Avanatro Tools/. Predictable bucket.

Background

The workshop is run single-handed by Avana. Vocational background in application development, with over a decade of professional production work shipping business-grade software: the kind of discipline that pins behaviour with tests, not with hopeful prose in the documentation.

Unity has been the side-craft for the last four years, alongside the day work. Now the side-craft is the work: indie games and the Asset Store tools that emerged from building them. Every plugin in the catalog is used in the maker's own games first. Dogfood, then listing.

Beyond tools

Same maker also runs avanatro.com/minigames — a small set of free browser games for tech-affine people who like Steam, anime, and Wordle-shaped puzzles. No tracking, no signup, public worldwide leaderboards. The minigames are also the dogfood for some of the plugins listed above.

What this isn't

• No subscriptions, ever. Buy once on the Asset Store, install once, own forever.
• No telemetry. No phone-home. No analytics SDK hidden in the package.
• No "register your asset to unlock features."
• No NPS pop-ups in the Editor.
• No private Discord support gating.
• No "v1.1 will fix it" placeholders in the documentation. If a feature isn't in the current shipping build, it isn't a feature yet.

Contact

Bug found, question about an API, or considering a licence for commercial use? Email contact@avanatro.com with the plugin name in the subject line. Response window: 72 hours. The workshop is single-author, so no scripted helpdesk replies.