[phantom_package]

I really enjoy Unreal's Blueprints. I program in a text-based language for work, so it's fun for me to go home and be able to hack on a game without having to spend more hours staring at text on a screen.

A big difference that I've noticed is that in a visual scripting language, the "nodes" in the graph can change their shape/color/layout/etc based on what type of node they are. I love this. With blueprints, if I'm putting together a material and I put in a color node, a color picker shows up. If I put in a TextureSample node, a little picture of the texture shows up. In a text-based language, every variable is just a string of characters - if you want to be able to tell at a glance what type of object a variable contains, you need to adopt some kind of a naming convention (or use an IDE that highlights them).

Debugging in unreal is also really cool. The "code paths" light up when activated, so it's really easy to see exactly which branches of code are and aren't being run - and that's without actually using a debugger. Side note - it would be awesome if the lines of text in my IDE lit up as they were run. Also, debugging games is just incredibly fun and sometimes leads to new mechanics.

I initially thought that organization would be a problem, but it turns out that you can make functions just like any other programming language, and encapsulate blueprints inside of them.

There are also some things that I don't like about Blueprints. Typecasting usually involves an extra node which feels verbose. If/thens are handled with a "Branch" node, which again feels verbose.