Jumping into Playmaker

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I spent the better part of the day organizing past posts. On one hand I've convinced myself that organizing these old posts will make it easier for me to add some notes on the latest revist to Unity. On the other hand, I've let myself procrastinate most of the day.

I've been thinking about trying to jump back into Unity to try to make something and I was reading an interview with Gareth Damian Martin, the creator of Citizen Sleeper, and he mentioned his work with a visual scripting solution. I think I brushed them off before because it wasn't game developerery enough and moved on. When I looked at a list of games that used Playmaker, I was surprised at the number of games I've played myself: Hearthstone, Hollow Knight, Inside, etc. I would have never suggested that these games were lacking in responsiveness.

Citizen Sleeper's story and approach to games is inspiring. I thought "damnit, I want to tell a story through games." So here we are revisiting some of what I've learned. Playmaker has not allowed me to make a prototype in a day, and at $65, I'm going to need to put in some time to make it feel like it was worth it. I could see the value in the tool watching some of their tutorial videos before buying the asset. The visual approach appeals to my brain more than looking at the code - think of a flowchart where you can see the interactions with gameobjects as they're triggered while playing in Unity.

It was naive to think that Playmaker would solve all my problems. I've already had to look up a couple additional assets to add when I hit an error with a Text Mesh Pro component versus a basic text component. I am using the latest Longterm Support option for Unity and it has Text Mesh Pro builtin, but Playmaker does not. Seems like they're content to let the community solve this problem with their own asset. Here's a tutorial about it from the creator.

The same goes for Ink - here's some community information about some Playmaker actions. It's nice seeing an example like Citizen Sleeper to see what can be done. I figure I'll go through their tutorials to see what's possible and find what I can make use of, then practicing with Ink, because it doesn't seem like there's a lot of widely available information about making Ink work.