Playmaker - visual scripting for Unity

[Dualhammers]

Playmaker is a Unity extension that provides a visual scripting system. It allows you to program or prototype games without knowing pretty much anything about programming. I've been using it for the past month on my own game and I've been able to going from knowing nothing about Unity or C# to a fairly functioning game that I will soon be sharing on idlethumbs dot net.

This is pretty much a shill post but when I was first learning Unity I was overwhelmed by the amount of extensions out there and I wanted to share what has worked for me, a random person on the internet. 

[clyde]

I would love to try Playmaker out for a day or two. I have no real concept of it's advantages over scripting.

[Chris]

We're using Playmaker on Firewatch. I also know that The Novelist was 100% scripted in Playmaker--Kent didn't write a single line of code. We're writing plenty of our own code for Firewatch, but Playmaker is still a really valuable tool.

[clyde]

  On 4/22/2014 at 3:43 PM, Chris said:

We're using Playmaker on Firewatch. I also know that The Novelist was 100% scripted in Playmaker--Kent didn't write a single line of code. We're writing plenty of our own code for Firewatch, but Playmaker is still a really valuable tool.

 

How do you all decide what to do with scripting and what to do with Playmaker?

[Dinosaursssssss]

There's a Boston Unity Group meeting tonight that's actually about this tool, which is well timed for me as it has come up more than once as I've been researching how to script cinematic sequences. I'm curious how useful it'll be to me as a person who knows C# fairly well, if I learn anything particularly interesting I'll be sure to report back.

[Murdoc]

Oh sweet, this is just what I needed.

[Chris]

  On 4/22/2014 at 3:49 PM, clyde said:

How do you all decide what to do with scripting and what to do with Playmaker?

This is probably a fairly intuitive and complex issue on a day to day basis, but one general principle I would put forth is that if you find yourself having to redo an identical or very similar block of Playmaker script again and again (say, a door interaction), it may be worth formalizing it in code--perhaps in a custom Playmaker action that you can then call as many times as you need.

[Dinosaursssssss]

Based on the talk I just saw, this tool seems pretty useful; I think I'm most likely going to adopt it in the future, specifically for scripting cutscenes/in-game cinematics. The node-based visual editor seems really intuitive/well-made, and for $95 it's cheap compared to the time it would take me to whip something up for scripting dialog and such.

 

On the other hand though, watching 2 artists explain Playmaker I could kinda feel my C# knowledge slipping into redundancy and it scared me a little bit.

[ihavefivehat]

I've been using Playmaker, and it's pretty cool.

 

It's allowed me to get games running without actually learning C# or any of the Unity syntax. Sometimes I get frustrated when I know I could type something out faster that it takes to click through the Playmaker menus. Of course, like Chris said it's probably awesome when used in combination with actual code.

[itsamoose]

Is it difficult to debug playmaker scripts?  I've never used it, mostly because I'm much more comfortable writing code, but I've had some issues trying to debug complex scripts with other systems.

[Abban]

Has anyone used the Pro Tools? http://www.protoolsforunity3d.com/ I've been thinking about buying them but don't know if they'll actually be a help or not.

[hedgefield]

I did a project in Playmaker a while ago, a big 2D adventure game, and without Playmaker I don't think we could have done it. There was a lot of branching dialogue and having that in front of you visually as a network of connected boxes is the greatest.

 

You can basically call every script command available to you through Playmaker, and it shows up in a little gui box that tells you which parameters it needs. We made some custom scripts too, like for a dialogue system, which isn't too hard, but for a basic game you can already do quite a bit with the defaults. It's a shame the extention is so relatively expensive. It does also come with a copy of iTween nowadays.

 

Probuilder is pretty rad for level design without having to touch a 3D program, kinda reminded me of the old level editor that came with Tomb Raider V or whatever. I don't know what else is in the bundle though.

[Dualhammers]

Woah. Posted this kind of drunk a couple days ago and just found it again. Pretty cool to hear I am not the only one using this tool.

I found very quickly it was useful for teaching myself the structure of c# and and how Unity handles component scripts. Working out a project in Playmaker until I hit a wall and then building a solution in code was ideal.

One thing I found it did not do well, however, was dialogue trees. It is better than a lot of things but like Chris said repetitive work should be simple and setting up a dialogue response takes a lot of actions.

What I figured out was that Twine outputs plain text source code, so I wrote a parser for twine source files and built a set of actions that read from the parsed file and display the appropriate passages. One action loop, no need to repeat, and I can write all the dialog in twine. Pretty neat since I am writer by skill and not really a programmer.

[hedgefield]

That sounds rad. I've started using Twine recently too to manage my branching dialogue (because you're right, it is a hassle sans custom scripts). Any chance that you would release that parser? Sounds like something more people could enjoy.

[Dualhammers]

Going to try to!  Teaching myself how to refactor right now so it can be useful as a tool.

[Abban]

That's a really good idea, it'd be super good to have a node package to do that. @Semiotic if you put your code on Github we can contribute to it.

[Dinosaursssssss]

If anyone was put off by the price, Playmaker is on sale right now for $25 for 24 hours. I'll probably pick up a copy just 'cause I'm curious about it, though what I really want is the source code for their editor window which unfortunately seems to be packed in a .dll.

 

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/368

[clyde]

  On 5/20/2014 at 2:22 PM, Dinosaursssssss said:

If anyone was put off by the price, Playmaker is on sale right now for $25 for 24 hours. I'll probably pick up a copy just 'cause I'm curious about it, though what I really want is the source code for their editor window which unfortunately seems to be packed in a .dll.

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/368

Damn it. I was doing so well on the fence. I'm just going to go ahead and get it based off of reccomendations ( even though I still gave no idea what I would use it for).

Believe the hype.