It's an exceedingly popular way of writing materials/shaders in 3D content tools -- I'd guess more so than any game programming/logic (of course big game engine

It's an exceedingly popular way of writing materials/shaders in 3D content tools -- I'd guess more so than any game programming/logic (of course big game engines tend to have visual shader tools as well) It can be (usually is) far less intimidating than text-based coding. Compare: - a text editor with a hello-world template script, a whole keyboard and now the engine yells at you because you (bravely) did something trivial to start, like adding a blank line in between "hello" and "world" - a canvas with a big "add node" button which brings up a list of verbs and nouns organised into native-language categories Asynchronous code can be hard to follow. Visual programming / node graphs are actually pretty good at representing complicated asynchronous logic. I think this is pretty closely related to why diagrams / drawing / whiteboards are commonly cited as helpful by programmers. I haven't used Unreal Blueprints. I have used Unreal (3, UDK) Kismet which is not particularly related (to Blueprints) other than the "Unreal" part, AFAIK. It was quite capable for most level design scripting logic, but was not ideal for implementing new mechanics for example. You could also copy nodes in/out as plaintext which I always appreciated as a feature I don't see very often.