[buzzybee]

As soon as I saw a logic gate implemented for a single keypress I was "noping" out of there. Visual methods, to a one, break down quickly when they reproduce low-level digital logic. At that point, you have a software circuit board, and this is a thing that your CPU can represent just fine by coding in assembly and possibly adding an abstraction on top for a dataflow representation.

Graphics are absolutely wonderful, in contrast, when they are able to stick to a domain abstraction, which is why we have a notion of application software at all. I have, in fact, aimed towards discovering what a "Pong synthesizer" would look like, so I have the domain knowledge to know that it does tend to lead to the digital logic breakdown if you aim to surface every possibility as a configurable patch point. As a result I started looking more deeply into software modularity ideas and rediscovered hierarchical structures(Unix, IP addressing, etc.) as the model to follow. I'm gradually incorporating those ideas into a functioning game engine, i.e. I'm shipping the game first and building the engine as I find time, and I do have designs for making a higher level editor of this sort at some point.

However, I also intend to have obvious cutoff points. There are certain things that are powerful about visual systems, but pressuring them to expose everything at the top level is more obscuring than illuminating. So my strategy is to instead have editors that compile down to the formats of the modular lower-level system, smoothing the "ladder of abstraction" and allowing people to work at the abstraction level that suits them.

[johnp_]

The logic gate's primary function seemed to be in limiting the paddle to not move outside of the playing field.

Otoh, in a visual programming language it'd feel more natural to make the upper and lower edges of the playing field collidable (I'm sure there's a better word for that), so that moving the paddle is inherently limited by collision with the edges.