Hi everybody! I’m a programmer with three years experience. But I’m newbie with unity
Today, playmaker sale off 75% and I bought it. But after that I read some topic and many people said that programmer shouldn’t use it. So i’m confused that should i spend time to learn playmaker or continue old way to make game myself. I need some advices!
Thank you very much 
I’ve never used Playmaker, but why not if you can build games faster and quicker go for it.
Maybe you will find the limits of Playmaker or it will get in you’re way and you will delegate it to a prototyping tool or maybe you will find that with some code you can make the games you want.
But you should also be able to make a game without it. What if you have the option to get a job or work with a great team but they don’t use Playmaker and have already started development.
Hopefully other developers with Playmaker experience will chip in soon, as I’m interested to know how they have found it.
I never played with playmaker but heard a lot about it. Now it is a node based visual programming tool, like kismet on unreal engine probably. If you want to learn programming, you should avoid this kind of approach. Finishing a game is kinda different than learning game development. In practical world, we developers, rely on many awesome tools. We leverage SSE, mayaLT’s shaderFX etc power for quickly generating shaders. We leverage the power of gui solution like NGUI, DFGUI etc sothat we do not have to build from scratch, huge time saver. We use tom’s terrain tools for quickly making engine recognize our external program generated detail(splat they say) maps, instead of making a shader(interacting with some editor classes) which does the job. We use already built A* pathfinding like rain, sothat we do not have to manually code this system. We use loom for multithreading support, sothat we do not have to manually support APIs. We use beast for lightmapping, this way we do not have to use big $$$ software to generate our light information. A lot of examples. They save time and money. Which derives game industry. I hope you realize 
I bought playmaker when I first started as my code-fu was 20 years out of date. Within a year, I had learned enough code that I barely used it. Two more years and I only use it for one thing: to parent a bunch of body parts to other body parts for clothes. Oh, and occasionally, I will use the camera fade out/in action. Easier than creating my own but not really something I couldn’t do if I wasn’t already using it in my project. I say, save your money and start with tutorials. Playmaker is often on sale so this is not your last chance to get it for half price.
PlayMaker is kind of an interesting. Some people view it condescendly as a “noobie tool”. However, state machines have been used by experienced game developers for ages now. But those devs don’t use FSMs for everything; they still do a lot of their work in code.
So here’s my take:
If you see a part of your game that obviously fits the state machine pattern, then by all means, use PlayMaker for that. Unity more-or-less did the same thing with mecanim. Why schedule all those animations in code (legacy) when a state machine adequately represents what you want to do?
BUT, if part of your game doesn’t look like a state machine, just do that part in normal code. Anything that requires, say, complex computation really shouldn’t be done in PlayMaker.
If you’re a programmer you may want to start off doing everything in code to learn how Unity really works “under the hood.”
Create a scene, create an empty GameObject, attach a script to it, and start doing stuff via code (instantiating objects, working with the update loop, etc.).
Oh yeah, you also might want to take a look at React or Behave, which both use a behavior tree model instead of a FSM model. Interesting stuff.
I was going to say what turkeypotpie said. If you can program, then Playmaker is probably pointless for many tasks. But for things that are best represented as state machines, then Playmaker is very useful.
Its cheap, makes things easy, and you can pretty much do everything with it. If you can program, then thats great too.
Kinda opposite for me, I found it harder to use playmaker than just code it
Personally, from a programmer perspective, I would spend that money on some art assets and not playmaker.
You also have to factor in maintainability into your argument. For instance, instead of using the mecanim system, you might find it easier to just code it rather than use its state machine. But if you have, say, 30 animated characters, you’ll be happier to have those done more uniformly inside a tool.
As a programmer I found the fiddle factor was way higher with playmaker than it was worth. I had hoped to use it mostly for visual debugging so that I could see program flow in the editor but that it was enough bother I was mostly avoiding it while iterating. Playmaker really isn’t anything like Kismet.
Writing loops in Playmaker ended my brief love affair with it. It was interesting as an introduction to FSMs.
I’m heard fro quite a few programmer friends that playmaker is a pretty good rapid prototyping tool.
Programming goes way above my head so it is great has worked great for me. Gets a bit tricky when you want to do some complex stuff though. But that is where your programmer skills could come in handy!
Hmm. 871 voted 5 star in asset store. 6000 topics in Hutong forum with 30000 posts. And now Dreamfall Chapters used playmaker : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3IjY1gKuJw . The longest journey series is my favorite game when I was a child. OK, I bought it and I’ll try it. I don’t think it only for artist who can’t code. If you see game nowadays is bigger and bigger
I find it great for level scripting(puzzles, switches, doors, etc…), for more advanced math it’s better to code.
I also find myself sometimes using it as unity scripting reference, it’s actions browser is better organized than the web portal.
I bought Playmaker when it first came out but have never used it because it’s just quicker to code. My problem with Playmaker is that one has to learn how to use it and I have no time to do that, I’m hoping to get some time this summer to spend messing about with it. But since it’s inception it has transformed into this major tool that is robust enough to make a commercial game with. If you are new to Unity then it is a good idea to use Playmaker because otherwise one ends up looking through scripting documents ad infinitum to do things, whereas Playmaker is pretty clear with the actions provided so starting to make games in Unity with it will speed the process so it is worthwhile. You should also note that a great many commercial games have been made with it, and the games being made are getting larger. It is a rapid prototyping and a rapid development tool, given that the most important thing nowadays is the ability to rapidly develop a game Playmaker helps in that regard and in essence it is no different than the idea of using Unity itself which is largely used because it too provides the ability to rapidly develop so I wouldn’t get caught up in all the nonsense about ‘real programming’, make use of the best tools available to get the job done as quickly as possible. In this regard Playmaker is one of the best tools out there.
That was well said sicga123… And I’m an artist and found Playmaker extremely useful for me as a creative. I’m currently tooling around Plygame Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making because as stated before by Bridin, it can get complex quickly if you don’t use managers. Plygame is also an interesting tool as well because of its “scratch block system”, but I digress.
In the end $25 for Playmaker is a very sound investment.
Good luck!