(Deep Sea Game) Visual Scripting / by Legolas Wang

I think, in a way, people underestimated the power of visual scripting. Well, certainly I did not. In this article, I would like to share my opinion about visual scripting and how it is used in the Deep Sea game.

From time to time, I read comments about people speaking down about visual scripting in the unity environment because it seems like cheating. However, I think those people overlooked the benefit of time saving and ease of debugging when you could do things visually. Traditionally, if you want to hard core some mechanic, the steps are to manually created and linked some scripts, linking the components you want in all scripts, and the last thing you do is to write the actual mechanic.

With the help of visual scripting, you could put your attention of what logic you actually want to get, and save hours of time coding repetitive contents. For the graph like below, I’m using a visual scripting tools to handle the door locking mechanics in game, which jumps between different stages. Using visual approach allows me to tweak the logic any time without the hassle of working modification codes on multiple places in codes. This, in a way, gives me more confident to try different setups to find the most appreciate one.

That is not to say the visual scripting is without problem. As people also said, the visual scripting has limitation in the code support, because there are only certain things available in the visual scripting. It is in a way, true, but here is the actual power of visual scripting. You could always use it when it is appropriate, if not, just switch back to the hard coding.

Those approach allows me to achieve and play around mechanics very quickly and efficiently. In the mean time, only write code when I absolute needs to, to achieve unique effect. Personally, this will continue to be my No.1 approach to do things within Unity. Yet the exploration of finding better ways to do things will never stop.