Codeless Game Engines -- Engines with Visual Programming Languages

hello everybody's my carrot game from scratch and in the past on this channel we looked at C++ c-sharp hacks Lua JavaScript and Python develop game engines today we are going to look at that new breed of game engines as a codeless or no code game engines which more specifically are visual programming languages now the truth of the matter is you are still coding here you're just doing it in a different interface some kind of visual either behavior event spreadsheet or no graph kind of approach to game development but the entire idea here is one of a couple of approaches it's either designed for where programmers can easily expose attributes to designers or it's designed to be easier to use and more of an introductory approach to game engine so what we're gonna do is look at first 3d game engines and then 2d game engines that have visual scripting interfaces now as you can see I have an article up on games from scratch it has everything we're about to cover here quite literally so if you missed something in the video don't worry check out the link down below and in that link as well I have links to the earlier covers we did about the different programming languages byte game engines so if you are looking for a specific game engine to use with a specific programming language I got you covered there so without further ado let us jump in now the first engine we are going to talk about today is the armor is 3d game engine now armory is built on top of blender it's gone a bit quiet there hasn't really been an update in a couple of months and I'm starting get a little worried there but this one uses blender system you've got two ways of programming it you can program using nodes inside a blender like you see on the graphic in front of you or you can use the hax programming language it's not the most beginner friendly product out there but if you already know blender then this could be a great choice for you on that topic there's also verge 3d and the one that it was based off it's not coming to me right now but there was a couple other ones that also run inside of blender but it's armory that I'm gonna focus on today now next up we have build box now I just discussed build box the other day and it's under the 3d category just because build box 3 just shipped and it has 3d support as the long word the 2d support so here you can see it uses a flowchart type approach it's a lot less flexible a lot of other game engines basically if it doesn't have the functionality you want outside of the box you're probably a bit screwed but it's also one of the easiest to use it's also got a pretty hefty price tag which did come down a bit but it's still quite expensive a couple hundred dollars a year on a subscription basis so next up we have cry engine now cry engines visual programming language I pronounced it wrong all the time I'm gonna go to schematic 2 this today but basically it is more designed so that you can expose parts of your game out to a designer so you're still going to need a programmer to make games using cry engine but as you can see there is the schematic system that you can use for developing the game logic inside a cry engine it is more complicated than a lot of them this is not really designed to be an alternative programming language to the other options it's designed to be supplemental so you can make it so that you know like a designer can see this coming and tweak values and play with things and change them around but it's not designed as kind of like you don't write your entire game using schematic in CryEngine except we have coffee cube coffee tube actually takes a bit of a different approach there is now a completely free version of it so that's definitely made it a more approachable engine I did a full tutorial series on this guy and by the way for anything where I have more details I did a tutorial series on armory that I discussed earlier there will be a learn more link on the game from scratch article so if you want to learn more about this particular game engine if I have covered it either in a video or a tutorial series there will be a link there for you to learn more so cup of copper cube it's approach is pretty straightforward you basically add these behaviors and you do things like add behaviors to objects like fly on a circle rotate follow things you add actions on top of behaviors and so on so it's using a menu based system if you hit a wall with copper cube you can write your own extensions using the JavaScript programming language however but you can do a whole lot without touching a line of code it is a very nice beginner friendly language in that case or an engine in that case both of course you get all the other tools like world design terrain creation and so on next up we have the Godot game engine now godot's primary programming Methodism is the GD script scripting language and on top of that you have C sharp support increasingly coming and then on top of that we also have visual programming as you can see it in front of you now truth of the matter is I don't really see any value in this as it stands it's just it's not high level enough to be really useful and it's low level enough that you might as well just use GD script but I think this might be the beginning of something coming in the future let me know if you've got a different opinion down below but in my experiences visual scripting gadot brings nothing to the equation it's not good for a beginner and if you already know how to script it's not efficient so I don't really know what purpose this is serving other than to check off the checkbox for we have a visual scripting language too although this is ground zero and things do tend to improve over time especially with an open source project like this if someone embraces it so this could just be the basis of something coming in the future but as it stands right now I see very little reason to actually recommend using visual scripting goodell except we have unity unity that does not belong in this list yet but I'm including them for a couple of reasons first off visual scripting is one of their two new features for the 2019 so in 2019 they are going to be getting their own visual programming language at least in beta form on top of that they also have a number of add-ons from the atom store what you're seeing in front of you is from the bolt add on it uses a traditional flow graph type approach to enable you to visually script any object inside of the Unity game engine and there are other add-ons there's playmaker and a couple of others in the asset store that are the most popular ones so if you want to add visual scripting to the Unity game engine it is definitely an option there now we also have Unreal Engine ow Unreal Engine is probably the reason why a lot of these guys have their visual programming languages at the higher end if blueprints is a full-blown programming system you can write a game entirely in blueprints now at the same time blueprints are really advanced so you're basically learning to program here it's not like a complete replacement oh the question is does this kind of programming speak to you and the alternative and the world of Unreal Engine isn't something friendly like Lua or C sharp or something it's C++ so this is one of those cases where yes if you are an artist with no programming experience you are going to get up to speed faster using blueprints than you are using C++ at the same time they've also done a whole lot of performance improvements and I believe like blueprints were first launched they ran in about one tenth the speed of C++ now they're actually being compiled to C++ so you're getting comparable level of performance other than you know your hand optimization stuff isn't there so there isn't a huge performance price to be gained or paid to use blueprints in Unreal Engine but they are also really really advanced there are like hundreds of nodes in it so you do get into a layer of complication and what you also get with any kind of a branching type system like this is some of these things is your if evaluations to such actually start turning into way more than it would just be as a single line of code it could turn into six or seven nodes instead of just one line of code so that's kind of the trade-off you're playing you're getting when you're using these node based systems okay so now we're moving into 2d world and the first one we're going to talk about in the 2d world is clickteam fusion 2.5 now I actually did a review of clickteam fusion is clicked in it's what you will get if you click the learn more link and this guy is probably most famous for being behind the five nights at Freddy's series it uses a graph based system of a bunch of properties you click into different categories on different events in these kind of spreadsheet type flow chart watch the learn more to learn more it's a bit tricky to document here at first it's actually quite daunting it actually looks scarier than learning a scripting language but it quickly starts to make sense and you're gonna notice this approach is actually pretty common not really this - 2d grid approach they've got here so you gotta learn what each one of these icons to me so that's like your events for zip so if you want to handle an event of event type order like input in start a frame you would click in that check box and then you do the details within that one here your system level events and so on so that's the clickteam fusion approach next up we have construct three this one is a commercial also is clickteam by the way it's a pay once license I believe I click team our construct three is a subscription-based license around 100 dollars a year I believe you can try it completely free I've done a hands-on with this guy if you want to check that out click the learn more link this one is built in runs in your browser you're actually generating html5 game behind the scenes and one of the nice things is they've just released a new version that enables you to do inline JavaScript code directly inside it can struck 3 without requiring an add-on or a plug-in constructor ease approach goes to this method there is a programming model so you see here it's kind of events and then or behaviors and events that you kind of respond to and you have actions and objects such that are handled again it's a fairly common way of working with things with the event sheets in this particular case next up we have stencil now stencil is another one I've covered click learn more to learn more stencil is all about not requiring coding either once again you can see it uses behaviors and events in this particular case it is using this Lego style approach you're gonna see this again in just a second where I believe stencil got this idea behind but you see it's kind of building blocks that slot into other building blocks it's like LEGO pieces that can only slot into LEGO pieces of their particular kind it is pretty straight forward to be honest now one of the cool things with stencil is it's actually a code generator it's generating hacks code behind the scenes and you could also use the hex programming language a hundred centrist tensile so you don't need to use this behavior approach or this visual approach to do your coding but it is certainly an option now next up we have scratch and you're gonna see something that looks very similar to stencil but this is aimed at kids and this is MIT labs that created and maintained scratch and this was designed to teach people an introduction to programming and it's very kiddush it's very basic energy can see it uses that same Lego block approach but again this one is a lot more it comes with a bunch of graphics it's a very very very child-friendly setup it's quite simple if you're about eight or nine years old scratch is probably about ideal or if you're trying to teach someone of that age group speaking which I also have an article I will link it down below on getting your kids started in game development goes through a bunch of the languages we're actually talking about here and a couple of the scripting based wants so the next thing we have G develop now G develop has a lot in common with construct and a little bit in common with clickteam fusion but construct and G develop are very very very similar with one major exception G developed is open source and free which is a pretty major development and once again it is an action in behavior sheet approach so you see here you kind of got a list of events and then actions that happen or conditions that make those actions happen and that's kind of the the way you go about programming and you develop and licensing again is you can also do straight out I believe it's JavaScript only now it used to be C++ as well but I think it's just JavaScript now coding for your specific game objects makes it quite easy if you kind of run into a limitation of what gee develops got available to you you can quite easily extend upon that next up we have the Seminole game maker studio now game maker studio has been around for a long time and most people use their game maker script for doing their programming but that is not the only option they have another option in there called drag and drop and you see it uses this step by step based of blocks or things things like like just building blocks that you kind of build together I haven't in that guide to game maker studio 2 that will show you how this actually works I don't know that I like the icon based approach because a lot of these make absolutely no sense to me like what's this between a pac-man a pacman with some slices through a pac-man okay that's probably a rotating pac-man like it's it's not immediately obvious what a lot of these icons do like this branching versus this one which just branches one way and well how is that different than an else or you know I kind of the iconic approach does not really appeal to me and I don't know and I'm not really meaning to speak broadly of this but I don't know that a lot of people using game maker studio are actually using the drag-and-drop support I also don't know if there's a performance cost to be paid but do be aware that if you go with game maker studio there is a full-blown drag-and-drop based programming option in there and game maker once again is a commercial $99 licensed game engine with a bunch of other platforms that have an additional cost attached next up we have game sounds now I'm gonna be straight-up honest I have almost zero experience with game sallet at all from their own description they kind of targeted towards the educational market with GameSalad you can see here use and kind of a very similar approach to that we've seen in the past with you know we've got a conditional going on otherwise do this do this do this kind of tap screen to do this kind of event proach where you kind of you know event and then reaction kind of approach to things now if you run into limitations is game solid good there I don't know there's a whole lot of things literally about GameSalad I just do not know but it is a 2-d game engine that is aimed again at that educational market and I don't have a lot of experience with it so I'm mostly just mentioning it and then finally we have pixel game maker MV and this one's from the same guys that make RPG game maker and I should mention that there's a bunch of other game engines out there that are very specific to one particular genre that I'm not covering here so you've also got things like adventure there's a not game novel maker there's RPG game maker there's game boy studio which I covered just a couple weeks ago there's adventure game studio there's one that's built on libgdx it's all about making adventure games that are all using a visual programming interface but they are specific to one particular genre or type of game so I didn't cover them in this list but I did cover pixel game maker em because this is all about creating 2d you know platformers shoot-'em-up kind of games with a bunch of different genres and it's from the same publisher as RPG Maker MV now it uses this kind of flow chart based approach and a bunch of conditionals and it's crap yeah I guess we can leave it there I don't normally throw my opinion so strongly at a game engine but for something that costs $100 comes with this programming interface that is just confusing as hell I literally have talked about dozens upon dozens of game engines on this channel and I don't really see any upsides to pixel game maker mva there is very rarely that there is a game engine out there that I don't see a single thing to recommend for it especially when it's 100 bucks on Steam or often on sale for xfd or whatever but still and I don't it's in its current state it's not worth picking up and I've been keeping an eye on it since I bought it in the early access which it's still in it's been over a year and and it's still it's still pretty terrible I honestly could not give you a single reason to pick it up over say the Godot game engine which is open source and free and for every other game engine in this list I could give you at least one reason to pick it up over Godot so I guess that kind of speaks to something okay that is the it that is the end of it that is the codeless visual scripting game engines and once again I also have links for se C++ game engine so if you want to learn C++ there is a list of the game engines out there that use C++ and I've done it for hacks Lua JavaScript Python and C++ and as I mentioned earlier on I also did an article about teaching kids how to program games and which game engines and technologies to look for I will link that down below as well I may have missed one or ten if so let me know in the comments down below and if you have used any of these particular game engines and you have an opinion I would love to hear it in the comments down below as well now I know a lot of people visual programming isn't necessarily for you and I get it and this isn't meant to be for everybody and almost every case or at least say 75% of the game engines we're seeing here the the target audience isn't really you a lot of times if you're a dedicated program and this is more for a different segment but I'd be interested hearing your opinions in the comments down below and I will talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 109,902

Keywords: Codeless, Visual, Programming, GameDev, Game Engine, Game Development, Drag and Drop, Stencyl, Buildbox, Unreal, Unity, Armory, Godot, Scratch, Construct, GDevelop, GameSalad, CryEngine, Clickteam, GameMaker

Id: -vo7jTQE7dc

Length: 16min 53sec (1013 seconds)

Published: Tue May 28 2019