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Whether you identify as a programmer or not should not prevent you from having a good tool for the work. Even the very polished Blueprints in Unreal are not as

Whether you identify as a programmer or not should not prevent you from having a good tool for the work. Even the very polished Blueprints in Unreal are not as good as a text based programming.

bitwize 5y ago
I agree with you. But the "content creators" who are responsible for most of modern game development will flee in horror from anything that looks too much like programming. If you want to market a game engine with customizable behavior (i.e., it's programmable) to large AAA game dev teams where programmers are only a small subset of the whole team, you have to provide a way to allow people to program the engine without believing they are programming it. This is the value prop -- and the problem -- with "no-code" tools in general. If your visual representation expresses behaviors in a way that is specific enough to be interpretable by a computer, then the constructs in your visual representation are isomorphic to constructs in some textual programming language -- with significant drawbacks compared to a textual programming language. But this zombie keeps getting resurrected because programming is seen as technical scutwork to be undertaken by highly intelligent yet socially inept lizard people -- not the truly important people, the business, marketing, and creative types who make all the key decisions. So if you want to get them to express what they want the computer to do, you will have to provide a means for them to do so that does not resemble using a text editor to write code in some programming language. It's a bit like the modern version of the problem PC manufacturers had marketing to executives, despite the obvious advantages PCs would provide to them: PCs required typing, and executives considered to be secretarial or clerical work and therefore beneath them.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  I don't know who these "content creators" are that flee from programming, but I have never met or even heard of one. If you mean writers and artists, then sure, but you don't want them working on your game logic anyhow. If you can understand what is going on in visual code, you can understand what is going on in text code. I think you are trying to say the blueprints in unreal were created to "hide" programming with a nice interface, and you could be right, but I suspect the reason they exists is a lot less thought out. I suspect there are just some very talented engineers at Epic who really like visual programming and wanted to explore how powerful they can be. I think what they have created is amazing. Watching the flow of execution and the debugging really blows me away.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    I bet there are a couple of talks on the subject at GDC Vault, so they are relatively easy to find out.

Whether you identify as a programmer or not should not prevent you from having a good tool for the work. Even the very polished Blueprints in Unreal are not as good as a text based programming.

bitwize 5y ago

I agree with you. But the "content creators" who are responsible for most of modern game development will flee in horror from anything that looks too much like programming. If you want to market a game engine with customizable behavior (i.e., it's programmable) to large AAA game dev teams where programmers are only a small subset of the whole team, you have to provide a way to allow people to program the engine without believing they are programming it. This is the value prop -- and the problem -- with "no-code" tools in general. If your visual representation expresses behaviors in a way that is specific enough to be interpretable by a computer, then the constructs in your visual representation are isomorphic to constructs in some textual programming language -- with significant drawbacks compared to a textual programming language. But this zombie keeps getting resurrected because programming is seen as technical scutwork to be undertaken by highly intelligent yet socially inept lizard people -- not the truly important people, the business, marketing, and creative types who make all the key decisions. So if you want to get them to express what they want the computer to do, you will have to provide a means for them to do so that does not resemble using a text editor to write code in some programming language. It's a bit like the modern version of the problem PC manufacturers had marketing to executives, despite the obvious advantages PCs would provide to them: PCs required typing, and executives considered to be secretarial or clerical work and therefore beneath them.

jay_kyburz 5y ago
I don't know who these "content creators" are that flee from programming, but I have never met or even heard of one. If you mean writers and artists, then sure, but you don't want them working on your game logic anyhow. If you can understand what is going on in visual code, you can understand what is going on in text code. I think you are trying to say the blueprints in unreal were created to "hide" programming with a nice interface, and you could be right, but I suspect the reason they exists is a lot less thought out. I suspect there are just some very talented engineers at Epic who really like visual programming and wanted to explore how powerful they can be. I think what they have created is amazing. Watching the flow of execution and the debugging really blows me away.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  I bet there are a couple of talks on the subject at GDC Vault, so they are relatively easy to find out.