GoKit
A lightweight, flexible tweening library for Unity that simplifies object animations with a modular architecture.
What is GoKit?
GoKit is a lightweight tweening library for Unity that simplifies animating object properties like position, scale, and color. It solves the problem of creating smooth, controlled animations in games by providing a flexible, modular system that handles concurrent tweens, loops, and playback controls with minimal performance overhead.
Unity developers, particularly game creators, who need efficient and customizable animation tools for in-game objects, UI elements, or visual effects without relying on heavier animation systems.
Developers choose GoKit for its balance of simplicity and power—it offers a lightweight codebase with fast performance, extensive property support, and advanced features like TweenChains and TweenFlows, making it ideal for both basic and complex animation scenarios in Unity projects.
Overview
Lightweight tween library for Unity
Use Cases
Best For
- Creating smooth object animations like movement, scaling, or color transitions in Unity games
- Building complex animation sequences with overlapping or sequential timing using TweenFlows and TweenChains
- Optimizing performance with specific tweens for common properties like Transform position or Material colors
- Developing reusable animation configurations to streamline game development workflows
- Implementing time-scale-independent animations for pause menus or slow-motion effects
- Extending tweening capabilities with custom properties or extension methods for specialized use cases
Not Ideal For
- Projects requiring a visual animation editor or GUI-based timeline, as GoKit is entirely code-driven without built-in Unity Editor tools
- Teams that rely heavily on community plugins or extensive third-party integrations, due to its smaller ecosystem compared to libraries like DOTween
- Developers needing advanced physics-based animations or a vast library of preset easing functions, since GoKit focuses on core tweening with basic ease types
- Non-Unity projects or environments requiring server-side rendering, as GoKit is tightly coupled with Unity's update loops and component system
Pros & Cons
Pros
TweenConfig supports method chaining for a JQuery-like flow and is fully reusable, allowing developers to save and reuse animation setups across multiple objects efficiently.
Tweens offer playback controls like play, pause, reverse, and restart, with updates via Update, FixedUpdate, LateUpdate, or time-scale-independent methods for precise animation management.
TweenChain sequences animations in order, while TweenFlow enables overlapping animations on a timeline, simplifying complex choreography without manual timing code.
Specific tweens for common properties like Transform position and Material colors use direct access for hyper-fast performance, as benchmarked and highlighted in the README.
Extension methods for Transform and Material classes simplify common animations, and the TweenProperty system allows custom tween creation for any property type, ensuring flexibility.
Cons
The README is brief and points to a wiki for usage information, which may lack depth or examples compared to more documented alternatives, increasing the learning curve.
Generic tweens for any property are admitted to be slightly slower than specific tweens, which could impact performance in animation-heavy scenes with many concurrent tweens.
While free for use in games, the license forbids commercial distribution of the source code outside games, limiting its use in middleware, asset store products, or libraries.
The README does not detail a wide range of preset ease functions, potentially requiring developers to implement custom easing for diverse animation effects, adding development overhead.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related Projects
LeanTweenFOSS, and also the most lightweight tweening library for Unity. Allows you to tween any value you have access to via the .value() method
iTweenA simple, and easy to use animation system
DOTweenTween any numeric property or field (including Vectors, Rectangles, etc.), plus some non-numeric ones (like strings). This is the follow-up to HOTween
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