I'm planning to make a game in Unity. I  realize assets are possibly licensed and should be hidden away. Looking around the interwebs, it looks like the easiest method (for me) would be to put these assets in a separate folder that I specify in gitignore. How are you all managing this?

One thing I do is deliberately seek out Public Domain (PD) or Creative Commons (CC0, CC-BY) assets so that I have the rights to both integrate and redistribute those assets.

Some sites: 

• https://freesound.org/
• https://opengameart.org/
• https://www.kenney.nl/
• https://thebasemesh.com/

...and how to give proper attribution for those assets.

In a commercial effort, I would expect to get things properly licensed and signed off and possibly with a legal entity involved. For these game jams and experimental works however, permissive commons assets are great.

With Unity projects, I tend to keep my raw assets and unrelated stuff outside of Unity's generated project directory. Here's what a typical directory hierarchy looks like:

When backing up or archiving a project, I'll  just create a 7z archive of the whole thing. Not sure if it's what folks recommend but it works well enough for me.

Hope this helps!