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[stevesan]

You're seeing a lot of visual programming features being added to engines. Unreal Blueprints, Game Maker Drag & Drop, and things like Scratch have always been around.

I'm curious if designers use them (thus posting here, instead of Technical) and when. Do you use them for prototyping? What about them makes them nice to use?

Curious to hear people's thoughts!

[-Ross]

I learned the basics of game programming with UE4's Blueprints, and I was very happy with them! They're very easy to get started with, intuitive to use. Actually one of the nicest things was not the visual programming itself, but the convenient search feature for finding the function you want. It's searchable by related words. So you just need a general idea what you want to do, type it in, and you are likely to find what you need, even if you didn't know the name of it.

I don't think visual programming has much use outside of education though. People say "It's really fast for prototyping", but that's total nonsense. It's just another way of writing code, and it's at least 5x slower than typing the equivalent text in the best of circumstances. It's fast to learn, not to use. I think anyone with a desire to learn and get better will soon get tired of having to drag-and-drop three or four things just to multiply two numbers together. That's when you realize it's much less work in the long run to learn to type code instead of continuing to "write" it with some visual method.

My niece used Scratch a little bit when she was 10 or so. She had fun making a little game thing. And of course there's Scratch Jr. for 5-7 year olds. They are cool projects for sure, just not very practical for getting work done.

It would be cool to see more tools out there for mapping the connections between code modules in a visual way.

[stevesan]

I learned the basics of game programming with UE4's Blueprints, and I was very happy with them! They're very easy to get started with, intuitive to use. Actually one of the nicest things was not the visual programming itself, but the convenient search feature for finding the function you want. It's searchable by related words. So you just need a general idea what you want to do, type it in, and you are likely to find what you need, even if you didn't know the name of it.

I don't think visual programming has much use outside of education though. People say "It's really fast for prototyping", but that's total nonsense. It's just another way of writing code, and it's at least 5x slower than typing the equivalent text in the best of circumstances. It's fast to learn, not to use. I think anyone with a desire to learn and get better will soon get tired of having to drag-and-drop three or four things just to multiply two numbers together. That's when you realize it's much less work in the long run to learn to type code instead of continuing to "write" it with some visual method.

My niece used Scratch a little bit when she was 10 or so. She had fun making a little game thing. And of course there's Scratch Jr. for 5-7 year olds. They are cool projects for sure, just not very practical for getting work done.

It would be cool to see more tools out there for mapping the connections between code modules in a visual way.

Thanks for the reply! Yeah this is a common sentiment I hear. Visual scripting usually comes with a lot of nice features, such as searching for available functions, but often times the act of the scripting itself becomes quite cumbersome.

[InfiniteStateMachine]

So after using graph languages on various commercial and independent projects I've come to the conclusion they are find for simple graphs or functional parametrization. When they get too complicated I might have to work OT fixing them or reimplementing them in code.

This leads me to my current view on graph languages. They are amazing for designers to make functional design docs they can give to programmers to reimplement in code.

[Ordnas]

Yes, blueprints is very useful for designer and for programmers also, to be used for easy initialization of actors, for FSM flow logic and to fast prototype some gameplay features. The performance problem is there, 10x slower than native code, but if you avoid to use visual scripting in tick functions you should not have any problems at all.

[pelle]

I hope godot's visual language can get whatever features are needed to make it useful for building fsms. Not much interested in them other than that. Human Resource Machine is a cute and fun game though.

[InfiniteGamesDS]

I always used Playmaker for Unity.

It seems that some people doesn't like it because they think there's other things you have to program by yourself that Playmaker just can't do.

But they are really wrong, you can do a lot of things in Playmaker, i started with Blender Game Engine "When was something" like 10 years back, and as you can imagine everything works with visual programming!

Here's an example of what you can do with visual modules




Of course it takes time to do this kind of stuff, but if you have patience and constancy you will do it finally good.

[Ordnas]

The problem with visual scripting is not that you can't do specific things, in general you can do everything. The downsides are the problems that you encounter when you use any scripting language, such as performance problems (when your scene is very large and if you need to port your game on console), data structures that are a pain to manipulate and/or debug when you do something different than it is not a set/get an element; on a visual scripting, to do some maths, on long calculations you have a lot of nodes when instead on code you could just put everything on a line.

Also do not forget that in a working environment there are a lot of tools that help programmers to write and debug code fast (data breakpoints, visual assist and the plugins of visual studio).


Epic said that Fortnite was done most entirely on Blueprints, but it also said that Blueprints are 10x slower than native code. Yes, you can nativize Blueprint nodes when you build, but the translated code is not very readable and maybe not so optimized (I just looked once at a Animation Blueprint nativized, I could be wrong).


Visual programming is very good for prototyping things, without the need to wait minutes between compilations and reboot of the editor, but the missing tools to support heavy investigations and memory optimizations on console are still a mayor problems that do not give favor to visual programming.
For Actor Inizializations, UI and prototyping is very very good, but code remains the mainly way to release a stable and performant 3D game with high density details on the market.

[mega mega mega]

Been using them since Klik and Play. Long ago I started in BASIC, like a lot of people my age. I went on to dabble in every game creation software I could get my hands on. Without them I couldn't bring my ideas to fruition.

For a while I listened to those who said I had to learn a "real language" and to be honest I didn't make 1 game.

Game development is a hobby to me and I accepted a long time ago that I'd never be a l33t programmer. I admit I'd make better games if I were a better coder but in reality without these tools I wouldn't be able to make games at all.

[BoulignyGames]

You're seeing a lot of visual programming features being added to engines. Unreal Blueprints, Game Maker Drag & Drop, and things like Scratch have always been around.

I'm curious if designers use them (thus posting here, instead of Technical) and when. Do you use them for prototyping? What about them makes them nice to use?

Curious to hear people's thoughts!

I always used Playmaker for Unity.

It seems that some people doesn't like it because they think there's other things you have to program by yourself that Playmaker just can't do.

But they are really wrong, you can do a lot of things in Playmaker, i started with Blender Game Engine "When was something" like 10 years back, and as you can imagine everything works with visual programming!

Here's an example of what you can do with visual modules




Of course it takes time to do this kind of stuff, but if you have patience and constancy you will do it finally good.

So I've used playmaker for unity too. Its useful and so are most visual coding programs for just pumping something out for testing. Sometimes it can even be used for final code but I usually code it all myself.