My time with Unreal has made me not only fall in love with Blueprints, but become a believer in Visual Scripting as the future of game development. As an programmer, I was very hesitant to hop on the Blueprint bandwagon and obviously I still think there’s a need for writing code, but Blueprints for gameplay is just the tip of the iceberg. Sound, Art, Design, all these disciplines use Blueprints in Unreal and all of those skills carry over between these disciplines.
As I had my personal revelation on how useful Visual Scripting was for development, I also began to notice that many other studios have already figured this out. Snowdrop, Frostbite, Unreal and other big engines already have their own Visual Scripting editors for their respective engines. Unity, however, appears to be lagging behind. I’ve been aware of a few 3rd party solutions for Unity in the past, but recently there has been some official support for a new tool called Bolt so I figured what better time to check it out.
So to put Bolt to the test, I figured I’d take my previous Asteroids game and just delete all the code and try to re-do everything with graphs. While Bolt does a lot of things right(including catering to users coming from Blueprints) there’s still a lot of big missing features, specifically Inheritance within graphs and more communication between graphs and code. Another small issue that is big for someone who is a bit more OCD like myself is a lack of tools to make graphs less messy, avoiding stuff like this:
I actually had a quick chat with LUDIQ and was assured that those features are on the roadmap. For now, Bolt could work great as a Designer’s playground for prototyping or high level features but it’s well on it’s way to becoming a Blueprint rival.
You can find the code-less project here.
Time permitting, I hope to take part in their game jam in a few weeks.