Playmaker or Game Creator (non-coder)

Hi,

Just found out the Asset Store is having a huge sale today and found these two featured in the announcement.

I'm trying to just create a 1 level Third-person horde mode shooter. Spawn in at least 3 different enemy types that I can shoot at in a set amount of waves. I would like to know which one can actualize that goal for me the easiest as a non-coder. AI doesn't need to be that extensive just monsters chasing after the Player is enough.

Not to go into details, I just need this much to green light something so I would like to hear your recommendations.

Thank you!

 

I own both of these and for what you are describing, I think game creator will be easier.

 

Okay, thanks!

 

@stain2319 From all the Game Creator demo's i've tried, seems like it has performance issues, or have people not optimized them at all? Your experiences with it?

 

Why would you expect someone wanting to avoid coding because they feel it will be too difficult to be capable of optimizing their game logic? I know some people choose visual approaches due to circumstances making it difficult or outright prevent them from working with text but those people are a minority.

 

Yeah, I would say that optimization isn't really a focus of game creator in general. It's meant to be easy to use.

 

What issues are you having? They work perfectly fine for me. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that a web-player build is going to have nowhere close to the same performance as a desk-top build.

Also, if you're talking about a professional-level AAA amount of code optimization, I don't think you'll ever be able to get that from any non-coding framework.

 

One thing to keep in mind with your game scripting solution is that it's unlikely to be the cause of many types of performance issues. The scripts in a game are usually only a tiny part of its code, and if they're designed and written well they won't be doing heavy logic all the time.

In my experience the majority of performance issues in games come from developers not understanding what's happening under the hood, rather than from writing code which is slow in and of itself. That does happen sometimes, particularly with certain types of algorithms, but it's not even my first guess for performance issues most of the time.

As far as performance is concerned it can be perfectly viable to make your game in whatever language / programming system you feel comfortable using, and then when you have a measured performance issue in your code (eg: "pathfinding takes way too long!") you optimise just the bits of code related to that (eg: re-write your pathfinding algo in code to be faster and expose it to your logic graph as a node).

The catch is this:

People often go for visual scripting systems because they're under the impression that you don't have to do any programming. That's not true, it just changes the programming from text-based to graph-based presentation. You still have to understand the same concepts, be able to work with logic, and so on.

(I've seen that specific bit of advice repeated in different threads here a few times over the last week or so.)

 

In terms of performance, the best visual script for the asset store is Playmaker.

And it is excellent for prototyping because of its iteration speed.

It is also excellent for non-programmers, because it has many high-level actions that help to create any game. (Seriously, I know C#, but I almost never needed to code anything It has 99% of everything you need)

Not to mention that it is one of the oldest assets of ASSETSTORE, also one of the most reliable

Definitely worth it.

 

I think it's also worth mentioning that these two products are not the exactly same thing. Playmaker is a high-level visual scripting package, where as GameCreator is a collection of pre-built game features like a character controller, camera system, animation system, etc. Game Creator includes a basic form of visual scripting but is not a full-fledged visual scripting package like Playmaker is. In fact, On the GameCreator Discord there are some developers that are using both products in the same project.