Has anybody here finished a full game with Playmaker or Bolt or other visual scripting only?

I want to try to make a game with bolt and playmaker only, but I haven't been able to find any examples of full games being released that did that. I'm thinking of using playmaker for simple FSM, then bolt for when I need to more complicated things. Is it possible? Or would the game be really unoptimized / complicated to make all the systems?

Has anybody tried to, or released a full game with those visual scripting assets? What was your experince?

 

https://hutonggames.com/showcase.html

 

Yes

 

Thanks, most of those just "use playmaker" for small parts of the game, a few of them used playmaker exclusively for everything and didn't write any code.

Do you have any examples of Bolt or other visual scripting systems, where they made full games without writing any code?

I was worried about performance but seeing uNode and Bolt2 C# Generation features, it seems like the possibilities are actually limitless now lol

 

99% of coding that I do on my project is in Playmaker. But I do use a lot of third party assets. So there's a lot of systems in my project that use C#.

 

What in holy mother of voice acting, what a trailer

 

The new Unity Visual Script interpreter (Old Bolt) has a higher performance these days. so you should try to check it out.

Our team also uses Playmaker on 100% of the projects, and we've written some stuff in C# for him to manage.

 

Is there really a benefit of using visual scirpting vs writing code? I can imagine it will often end up being spaghetti on large projects. On the other hand that can happen with writing code as well.

 

Visual scripting is not intended to be a replacement for written code but rather a supplement used by the non-programmer members of your team to reduce the load on the programmer members of the team.

 

Spagetrihas nothing to do with using tools. Is matter of you personal coding culture.
Unreal blueprint is good example of being able do project, without needing knowing low level syntax.

Same applies for unity shader graph, which doesn't requires knowing from you, how to code shader by hand.

So yes, there are definatelly benefits there.

 

I can imagine it working well for some things. For example, Hollow Knight used it to program the boss / enemy logic and assuming Playmaker allows for more high level nodes, I can see how it may be easier to tweak and nicer to overview than straight up code.

 

Problem with visual scripting is it lacks on tools and collective knowledge, for example Bolt is only used inside Unity so it is Unity's sole responsibility to create and maintain debug/ versioning/ etc tools, where c# has a large user base/ use case outside of Unity's context and thus far more available independent resources/ tools.

Also, especially in case of only visual scripting project, it is quite important not to neglect studying programming principals/ concepts and not think that those are not needed just because not using a text based programming language.

 

For a person who already knows how to write traditional code, with visual scripting you sacrifice some control but gain speed and the ability to build complex systems rapidly without as much brain drain.

All the people I know who use both tend to rely on visual scripting to do the dirty work of figuring things out, then implement traditional code strategically where necessary.

For a person who does not know how to write traditional code, visual scripting can get you to being productive faster. But you still have to understand core principles of computer programming in order to go beyond the simplest applications like opening a door or make a character move from input.

As to organization - I think both tools have pro's and con's. VIsual scripting has limitations and that largely depends on the specific paradigm - i.e. how mature it is, how many people are using it, etc.

 

There are few specific problem types where having visual schematic helps. Those are signal processing and AI (behavior trees). Also state machines. Shaders/Materials, sometimes, fall under "signal processing".

Beyond that point visual scripting is a crutch/accessibility tool for people that can't program. Meaning in a team you could create a high level logic blocks and give them to designers, without teaching them to program.

If you're on your own and can program, you gain nothing, and lose efficiency. They're less efficient than code and shouldn't be used for very low level tasks.

Spaghettiness is matter of tools as well, as tools should assist the user in keeping things clean and readable, and unreal blueprints fail spectacularly at doing that.

At the moment it takes significantly more effort to keep Blueprint spaghetti readable and clean than it is to program clean code in C++.